On 07.06.13 13:20, Trent W. Buck wrote:
For example, anyone doing a simple "dist-upgrade" from Squeeze to Wheezy is likely to completely bugger their system due to apt blowing its heap trying to find an ordering ("could not perform immediate configuration").
Ah, then dist-upgrade remains an unreliable process, even on debain. I'd clone before upgrading, for quick unbuggering, but a process which doesn't work is of limited usefulness. At least, on redhat, ISTR that an attempted upgrade overreach resulted in a safe failure to proceed, and a warning. Finding an old intermediate version, and upgrading in two steps worked. (Many years ago. Haven't tried since.)
Anyone that follows the release notes FIRST can allegedly avoid this, but once it's happened repairing it is allegedly hard.
A dist-upgrade upgrades thousands of files, across hundreds of packages. I'm at a loss to understand how it could be either practical or worthwhile to manually check for stuff-ups across all of them. I'm accustomed to scouring README and INSTALL notes on source tarballs, but a working package manager is constructed for the purpose of managing the installs, at least to the extent of not doing harm. (It can't always be expected to succeed in installing, I accept.)
Ubuntu knows their users can't read, so instead they use d-r-u, which basically downloads a tarball of filthy little kludges to workaround upgrade issues.
That seems like a definitive recommendation for installing, and not upgrading. Erik -- Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do. - Robert A. Heinlein