[LAU] What on earth...

[david]

On 12/21/2013 07:07 PM, hermann meyer wrote:
> Am 22.12.2013 04:48, schrieb david:
>> On 12/21/2013 01:41 PM, Philipp Überbacher wrote:
>>> On Sat, 21 Dec 2013 22:23:42 +0000
>>> Will Godfrey <willgodfrey at musically.me.uk> wrote:
>>>
>>>> did the debian devs think they were doing?
>>>>
>>>> My music machine is set up precisely as I want it with no spare fluff
>>>> or eye-candy, and fits my workflow like a glove. I seldom make any
>>>> changes, but thought it high time I checked for upgraded packages. Up
>>>> till now this has never been any kind of problem and usually results
>>>> in some tiny overall improvements.
>>>>
>>>> Today was different. Without asking, indeed, without even a warning,
>>>> they installed GDM, Gnome3 and pulse audio, thus rendering my
>>>> computer totally useless. The only thing I could do was reboot, then
>>>> log into recovery mode, find aptitude and delete the crap.
>>>>
>>>> I will never really trust debian again :(
>>>
>>> apt-get upgrade didn't show what it was planning to do? That sounds
>>> unlikely, but if it did happen, then something is very wrong in
>>> debian-land.
>>
>> Hmmm, haven't had Debian do that to me. A DIST-UPGRADE might have
>> messed things up, but not a straight upgrade. A straight upgrade
>> doesn't install things you don't already have installed unless (I
>> think) they're a dependency of something else you already have
>> installed. IOW, you already had something on there that involved GDM,
>> Gnome3 or PulseAudio.
>>
>
> Funny, I did a full dist-upgrade on my debian-sid box yesterday, which
> /remove/ GDM. But indeed, apt-get informs me before about any new
> package, as well about any package it wish to remove.
> So I switch to lightdm before the dist-upgrade.
> By the way, you should be careful with a  "straight upgrade" on debian
> sid, better do a DIST-UPGRADE, because, for example, library’s could
> come in new, non-compatible versions, which make it necessary to  remove
> older versions before they get replaced with newer ones (with changed
> names). When you only do "straight upgrade", you will end up sooner or
> later in a unstable system state.

Hmm, have been doing just straight upgrades for many years now and 
haven't encountered an unstable system state. So far, if a straight 
upgrade has hit a situation where an upgraded package requires some new 
library with a different name, it lets me know and I can deal with it.

I've done dist-upgrades in the past, and successfully had them hose 
installed systems, so I prefer periodic upgrades, generally sticking to 
only upgrading specific apps I use.

But I run Aptosid, with turns Debian Sid into a very stable system. 
Aptosid does a good job of vetting package updates. I know a while ago 
they were blocking all Gnome updates because various core Gnome packages 
were in transition.

Of course, the most important part of any upgrade is to make a good 
backup of the system partition before the upgrade!

-- 
David
gnome at hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community
http://dancingtreefrog.com