Debian or Ubuntu?

[Felipe Figueiredo]

Steve,

On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 10:00 PM, Steve Lamb <grey at dmiyu.org> wrote:
> Mario Vukelic wrote:
>> On Wed, 2008-05-14 at 02:42 -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:
>>> And yet dist-upgrade has worked on my Debian machines for years now.
>
>> No it didn't. Never did, not in the way that is required for Ubuntu's
>> target users. I used Debian a lot, and every dist-upgrade required
>> manual dependency resolution, editing of conf files, etc. Fine for
>> Debian, but not for Ubuntu.
>
>    Ok, let me be blunt.  At no time in my memory of many, many upgrades
> across 2 desktops, 1 laptop, 2 rackmounts, 2 Xen VMs and 1 Virtosso VM has
> Debian's method of upgrading ever left my machines *UNBOOTABLE*.  *EVER*!
> This is now the /third/ Unbuntu upgrade that has left my machine unbootable.


I feel your pain, but it seems you're missing the point. Debian devels
expect you to upgrade using apt-get or aptitude. That's what they
focus on, and that's where they plan the upgrade paths to work. This
is not the case for Ubuntu (obviously), and maybe it can work (with or
without manual tweaks) or maybe not, and this is a major dfference
between them. I never bothered to dig on what exactly upgrade-manager
(or u-m-core) does, but I know (from this list and something I read
somewhere) that there might  exceptions scripted for the upgrade, that
even aptitude won't be able to guess.

This is specially true because Ubuntu changes a lot faster than
Debian, and I suspect (speculate) that it's easier to bypass known
dependency hickups with a scriptable workable upgrade path, than
making it all morally perfect for each and every package.


>    Hate to tell you but I tend to value a machine to which I can boot a tad
> higher than worry about your non-existent dependency "resolution problems" and
>  preferred manual conf file edits.  Both of which, I dunno...  REQUIRE THE
> MACHINE TO BOOT BEFORE YOU WORRY ABOUT IT!

Aside from what I just said, this case(s) really seem odd, I give you
that. Out of curiosity (and risking hijack the thread even more), did
you report bugs, or pursue exactly what happened?

regards
FF