Breezy upgrade question

[R Kimber]

On Mon, 17 Oct 2005 11:45:26 +0100
Eamonn Sullivan <eamonn.sullivan at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes, I understand that, but these are basic parts of Ubuntu. I believe
> the developers are working on some more granularity with the packages,
> but essentially what you are doing is running your own distro, using
> Ubuntu as a starting point. That's fine -- I'm all for it -- but if
> you want to piggy-back your distro on Ubuntu, you need to at least be
> running it when you do a dist-upgrade. No big deal: Temporarily
> pretend you want to run Ubuntu, install ubuntu-desktop, upgrade, then
> customize.
> 
> If Abiword is removed in the process, you don't lose any of your
> settings. Once up and running, reinstall abiword and off you go... I'm
> having a hard time understanding why people get a bit upset by this.
> Run a distro that uses just abiword then.

Well I guess the bit of upset comes from having less than satisfactory
default choices, coupled with the feeling that it's probably not
technically very hard to upgrade whatever applications are actually
in situ, if they're upgradeable.

For a start, it seems odd to have a particular word processor (OO)
that, when installed by default on my machine as part of the 5.04
distribution, doesn't print out-of-the-box and has no way of changing
its default printing arrangements, that gets removed when Abiword is
installed, and then when upgrading you have to re-install the
non-working default word processor.  And then re-install the working
one after the upgrade. That seems odd.

As far as exim/postifx is concerned, I've found getting email working
properly with any distribution a bit tricky and if a distribution is
going to regard one of them as crucial then it ought to be the one
that's easiest to get configured correctly.  I found exim to be the
one that I could get working.  Postfix was confusing because it's
configuration offered various choices and after choosing the smarthost
option, there wasn't any further reference to 'smarthost' (and
therefore not clear where to enter the smarthost address) and the
varous FAQs on postfix I found through Google didn't seem to mention
the word 'smarthost' at all. And after concluding that it must be the
'relay' entry (despite the feeling that relaying isn't always a
good thing) and after putting the address there it still didn't work, I
gave up on it.

It seems odd that a distribution should care that much about what I
might call non-system applications, why can't it just upgrade whatever
applications have been installed? So long as there is a supported
package for it.  If something is going to be regarded as an essential
part of the system, then it needs either to be automatically configured
or to have a very clear configuration sequence that produces a working
system.

Don't misunderstand me.  I think Ubuntu is really very good, which is
why I use it.  The point of criticism is to improve things.  And the
degree of upset is really not that great :)

- Richard
-- 
Richard Kimber
http://www.psr.keele.ac.uk/