Upgrading to Edgy Eft

[Mario Vukelic]

On Tue, 2006-06-27 at 13:57 -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:
> That wasn't the situation in the case I observed.  

It doesn't really matter, but in the thread I observed (and posted in,
in a friendly way), and which I took to be the cause for this current
thread, because they were in close temporal proximity, someone had a
package conflict and basically said, "I have a conflict, I followed the
same upgrade procedure as when I went from breezy to unstable dapper.
What is wrong?". And he received the answer that this is expected, and
he shouldn't run edgy if he can't handle such stuff. And his answer in
turn was a kinda snappy (paraphrased) "I've run sid forever, don't
lecture me"
This was all still all kinda friendly, but egos seem to have been
bruised ;)

This is a quite typical situation. Many people are used to running sid
(I was) and believe Ubuntu's unstable works approximately the same. But
it doesn't. The shorter cycles mean much more vigorous merging, and
while, at the beginning of the cycle, the merge with Debian's unstable
is in progress, unstable is pretty unusable most of the time, and
(contrary do Debian) it is not guaranteed that anybody cares all that
much.

> but really I think people should
> be encouraged to use edgy, not discouraged.

Experienced users who want to actively help with the development (or
bugfixing etc) should be encouraged. Every user who is being encouraged
should be told that to use edgy, he should  
      * Know how to recover from an unbootable machine
      * Have a Dapper live CD handy
      * Have an alternative way to access the internet, to be able to
        look up info and transfer debs to the edgy machine in the worst
        case
      * Have knowledge about the apt system
      * Read the relevant mailing lists
      * And possibly the wiki
      * Be willing to learn how to report bugs

IMHO, encouraging users who don't have these abilities and desires is
doing them a disservice, and not really helps the dev effort


> > (see the edgy schedule on the wiki).
> 
> Well, that's _another_ of my bugbears.  Everybody says "see the wiki", but
> nobody seems to have URLs.  At least a pointer to "the wiki" if not the
> correct page would be nice.

I figured that http://wiki.ubuntu.com would be known. There is a search
field, and if I enter "edgy", I find the release schedule
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EdgyReleaseSchedule (and I had posted this in
the other thread just a day earlier, so i left it out this time)

See, another reason for reading the relevant mailing lists as an edgy
user :) The schedule was announced on ubuntu-devel.

Note that until UpstreamVersionFreeze on July 13, packages will be
merged in. This will include a newer gcc
(https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EdgyToolchainRoadmap) Serious breakage is
guaranteed to happen.

In the event of serious but expected breakage, edgy users should be
aware of what's going on - nobody is helped by a hundred duplicate bug
reports for a known issue.