Dist-upgrade testing

[Michael Vogt]

Dear Friends,

I asked about testing the new dist-upgrade tool one week ago [0] and
the feedback was overwhelming. Thanks everyone who send me feedback
and logfiles. More testing is very welcome, I'm happy about every
report I get. 

I would like to summarize some of the reports here. For most people
the dist-upgrade can be calculated. Some packages needed to be
removed because they are currently broken in dapper:

mozilla-thunderbird-enigmail [broken dep on mozilla-thunderbird in dapper]
beagle [broken on libgmime2.1-cil]
amarok-gstreamer [problem with the libtag1c2a upgrade, haven't looked
closer yet]
k3b [problems with libtag1c2 -> libtag1c2a]

For people doing the actual upgrade things where not that smooth. The
following packages give dpkg errros during the upgrade:

coreutils (malone #27516)
tetex-bin (post-inst failed, error log attached)
krita (tries to override files in koffice-libs)
mplayer (don't have a log from this failure, may be some sort of
 unofficial package)

And some spurious conffile prompt:
- /etc/login.defs
- '/etc/firefox/pref/firefox.js'
- '/etc/firefox/profile/bookmarks.html' 
- '/etc/firefox/profile/search.rdf'

One system didn't boot anymore after the upgrade at all (see
attachment). 

A big problem is the current behaviour of apt on dpkg failures. It
will just stop and fail. This can lead to a half-upgraded system
(loads of packages unpacked, none configured). A simple and hacky
workaround is to try to keep dpkg going as long as possible, instead
of stoping on the first error. I would be interessted in feedback
about this. I think it's not worse than what we have now. 

A proper solution would require to stop on a failed packages,
recaclulate the upgrade without it and if it can no longer be
performed, downgrade again (something we don't really support).


Cheers,
 Michael


[0] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2006-January/014700.html
-- 
Linux is not The Answer. Yes is the answer. Linux is The Question. - Neo
-------------- next part --------------
Running fmtutil-sys. This may take some time. ...
Error: `etex -ini  -jobname=jadetex -progname=jadetex &latex jadetex.ini' failed
Error: `etex -ini  -jobname=jadetex -progname=jadetex &latex jadetex.ini' failedError: `pdfetex -ini  -jobname=pdfjadetex -progname=pdfjadetex &pdflatex pdfjadetex.ini' failed
###############################################################################
fmtutil: Error! Not all formats have been built successfully.
Visit the log files in directory
  /var/lib/texmf/web2c
for details.
###############################################################################
This is a summary of all `failed' messages and warnings:
`etex -ini  -jobname=jadetex -progname=jadetex &latex jadetex.ini' failed
`pdfetex -ini  -jobname=pdfjadetex -progname=pdfjadetex &pdflatex pdfjadetex.ini' failed
fmtutil failed. Output has been stored in
/tmp/tetex.postinst.XX3n7QSF
Please include this file if you report a bug.

-------------- next part --------------
Subject: New Dist-Upgrade

Michael,

I downloaded and tried out your new update manager last night, on a fresh,
non customized install of breezy.  The initial steps seemed to go fine,
except when it got the post configuration steps, the progress bar got 50% of
the way through and then told me to reboot.  I did, and then after GRUB
started and launched, the system refused to mount my root partition.  My
root partition lives on a PATA drive hung off the primary PATA controller on
my motherboard.  I was unable to find any drive letter combination that
would let me mount my root partition.

I ended up doing a fresh dapper install from a daily cd I had burnt
yesterday.

Because I could not mount my root partition I could not recover the upgrade
logs and I did not think to copy them off prior to rebooting the system.