Noobie question concerning upgrading, was Re: Daper -> Fiesty

[Mario Vukelic]

On Wed, 2007-10-03 at 07:45 -0300, Felipe Figueiredo wrote:
> I'm sill curious as to 
> what exactly kept me from succeeding, as I didn't quite understand the 
> gotcha.

Impossible to say without more information. A dist-upgrade is a very
complicated procedure that often is not completely automatically
resolvable with general-purpose tools like aptitude. Ubuntu's
update-manager allows the devs to tune it to one particular upgrade, and
special-case everything that might cause trouble, at least for
officially-supported packages.

> You seem to be more safe of the theory of the procedure than myself, so I'm 
> still interested in hearing your experience in this, should you find 
> time/resources to test it (if only to give us a more precise answer). Maybe 
> you could even clear a path for some bug reports and workarounds - it is a 
> FAQ after all, isn't it? Many would benefit if a Dapper -> Feisty or 
> Dapper -> Gutsy upgrade path was discovered, and published.

It's impossible to give a general outline, since everyone will have
different packages installed, often from universe and multiverse, and
thus come across different issues. It boils down to really understanding
how APT works and how to resolve problematic special cases, in the worst
case by installing specific packages manually with dpkg -i and its many
options (especially --force-things, with caution).

Everything you need to know is already available, partly at [1] and the
pages it links to [2], partly in the vast Debian documentation on APT
and dpkg, and partly in the form of years after years of mailing list
archives for Ubuntu and Debian that discuss various real-life scenarios.

There's really little more to do -- as I said, it's impossible to
explain every possible problem, the admin needs to learn the tools.

[1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes
[2] There are instructions for updating on the command line with
apt-get/aptitude for each release, e.g.,
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FeistyUpgradesManual
By reading the manual instructions for all releases, you will get a good
understanding for how to resolve conflicts. All the basic stuff is
there: commenting out third-party repos, installing [x,k]ubuntu-desktop,
apt-get and dpkg usage, etc.


> > dist-upgrades with apt-get/aptitude are not supported AT ALL. With good
> > reason, the only supported path is to use update-manager (which will
> 
> In ubuntu, you're correct. But IIRC apt-get/aptitude is the default upgrade 
> method in debian.

Yes, but Debian assumes a knowledgeable admin who possesses the
knowledge I have outlined. It was never different, and every Debian
dist-upgrade I performed (even without skipping releases) involved some
troubleshooting.

Regards,
M