Warty to Hoary Preview upgrade report

[Ming Hua]

I did an upgrade from warty to hoary preview, things were not quite
smooth but the result is good.  The following is my report and some
comments:

My system is a x86 machine, installed ubuntu with warty, and kept
relatively up to date (last security update was March 7th before the
upgrade).  I did a default desktop installation and didn't install much
additional packages (just gcc stuff and subversion), no unofficial
packages (not even universe) and no self-compiled kernel modules.  So I
hope it would be a typical upgrade.  I use aptitude instead of synaptic
though, so maybe some of the problems won't appear with synaptic.

I downloaded hoary preview CD, and used apt-cdrom to add it to
/etc/apt/sources.list.  I kept my warty and warty-security archive line
in sources.list (this may be a problem, see below about my kernel), and
ran aptitude.  Aptitude labeled a lot of packages to be upgraded, and I
just upgraded all of them (there were no broken packages).

1. One thing I noticed was that there are a few questions about
conffiles that got locally modified and I am asked if I want to keep the
old one with changes or use the new one comes with the package.  However
I never remembered changing them in the first place.  And looking at the
diffs, it doesn't seem I changed them either.  The files are:
    /etc/udev/scripts/{cdsymlinks,ide-devfs,scsi-devfs}.sh
    /etc/dbus-1/event.d/20hal
    /etc/gimp/2.0/{gtkrc,ps-menurc,templaterc,gimprc}
    /etc/console-tools/config
I have seen similar things using Debian sid, but I've never upgraded
from one releases to another (I started using Debian from woody).  So I
am not sure if this is common, but they are annoying since it interrupts
the upgrading process, and I had to be around to answer them.  And in
most cases, I don't know what (exactly) are these file for.  Since the
default is to keep the old files, I am afraid if a new linux user
answers this questions, he is going to just press enter, and new changes
in configure files are not going to be in the upgraded system.

2. I somehow messed up with my kernel packages and ended up with a
un-bootable system.  As I've said, I kept both the hoary preview CD and
the warty-security archive in my sources.list, and aptitude labeled my
linux-image-2.6.8.1-5-386 to be upgraded (from -16.11 to -16.12), and
also linux-image-2.6.10-4-386 to be installed.  I got some dpkg
configure failure at the end of the upgrade about some kernel packages,
and I thought I've seen them before in Debian because I can't remove a
kernel that is in use, and just rebooted without reading carefully.  It
turned out I am missing both initrd images in my /boot partition
(2.6.8.1-5 and 2.6.10-4), and I had to boot from the installation disk,
mount my system in /target, chroot in, and ran ``dpkg --configure
--pending'' to get the mkinitrd (in postinst script, I think) to run,
and solved my problem.  I think I did something wrong, perhaps my
sources.list, but I don't know for sure.

3. After the upgrade, aptitude labels some (uninstalled, mostly python)
packages broken due to 2.3->2.4 transition, but most of them are solved
after I add hoary archive to my sources.list again and upgraded.
However today after update I still have one broken dependency:
libgal2.2-1 is getting upgraded from 2.2.3-0ubuntu1 to
2.2.3ubuntu1-1ubuntu1 (the version looks funny by the way), both
recommends libgal2.2-common, but only libgal2.2-common 2.2.3-0ubuntu1 is
available, and it depends on exactly libgal2.2-1 (= 2.2.3-0ubuntu1).
Also, libgal2.2-1 is not depended by anything and it seems hoary has
libgal2.4-0, so I wonder why is there a new libgal2.2-1 package.

4. Many python2.3 packages and a few library packages are labeled
obselete by aptitude now.  I know they are there because they are not in
hoary anymore, and aptitude didn't label them ``automatic dependency''.
I am not sure what a synaptic upgrade will result, and I know tools like
deborphan, but does ubuntu team aims at removing obselete and unused
programs during upgrade?

I am also having some rendering problems in mozilla-firefox, most
obvious for serif italicized fonts (I use Vera), and also sometimes the
cpu usage going to 100% when browsing for now reason (happens often when
trying to select a URL in address drop-down box), but I'll investigate a
little bit first.

If the developers see any problem mentioned here should be submitted as
a bug, I would be happy to do so.  I just don't have time to search in
bugzilla.

Thanks for the great work.

Ming
2005.03.19