[clue-tech] Debian musings [was installfest]

[David L. Anselmi]

Collins Richey wrote:
[...]
>> They say "With a predictable release cycle [...] Kubuntu is the
>> GNU/Linux distribution for everyone".  Not for me though.  I prefer no
>> release cycle at all.
> 
> I would say Kubuntu is the Linux distribution for everyone since I'm
> not too fond of that particular Debianism.

Do you mean the "GNU/Linux" Debianism?  That's the accurate way to say 
it, Linux is just the kernel.  And since you can run other kernels (BSD, 
and Hurd eventually if not already) with Debian, Debian is at least as 
much GNU as Linux.  I doubt that I'd notice whether I had Linux or BSD 
under my Debian, except for the trouble I'd have to go through to get 
the one that wasn't the default.

> OTOH, I agree with you. No
> release cycle at all was  one of the things I liked about Gentoo. The
> only question is: can a binary distro really avoid disruptive
> upgrades? What happens when (it's when not if) glibc and gcc screw up
> everything in sight? Or when Gnome and KDE change the rules for all of
> their existing apps?
[...]
> One question: has Debian Testing allowed continuous upgrades through
> the glib/gcc and 2.4/2.6 and Xfree/xorg disruptive cycles? I got
> rather mixed results dist-upgrading from Ubuntu Breezy to Dapper, so
> that's my only comparison, even if that's really Debian Unstable. I
> found major breakage in xorg (got that fixed in a few days) and one
> irritating problem with locales that disappeared after I reinstalled
> from Flight 5.

I've never dist-upgraded Debian.  Since I use testing I get whatever's 
new when it's migrated.  So sometimes there are big upgrades (like KDE) 
but never one huge one that changes everything.  But what big upgrades 
have I been through?

The recent C++ ABI change.  The maintainers spent some time worrying 
about this.  There were rumors of breakage.  None of that impacted 
testing, except that there was a period where some new packages were 
slow to migrate into testing.  I don't know that I've been through a 
libc upgrade recently (but I bet it's painless).

2.4 to 2.6 (including upgrading to udev and a new initrd builder) was 
painless.  The first time I upgraded I didn't understand the 
relationship between 2.6 and udev and LVM so it didn't work out of the 
box.  I uninstalled what I had just done, waited until I had a clue, and 
then it was trivial.  And it turned out to be 2.6 vs. root on LVM, 
nothing to do with udev.

XFree to XOrg was trivial.  So much so I don't even know what the 
difference is.  I guess some files in /etc are different now.

KDE 3.3 to 3.4 to 3.5 have all been easy.  The only trick is that 3.4 
packages conflict with 3.3.  So if not all the packages are ready and 
you select some 3.4 it will delete the ones that are still at 3.3.  But 
that's easy to see coming in aptitude.  So you have patience and a week 
or two later everything goes right on in.

The one thing I've had issues with is that every big Open Office upgrade 
messes up the way one mail merge envelope print works and I have to 
recreate it every time.  I don't think that's Debian, but OOo trying to 
figure out the right design.  But it's a corner case in any event.

I will note that upgrades that might break lots of user code or config 
(Exim 3 to 4, Apache 1 to 2, Postgresql 7 to 8) are usually done in a 
way that allows you to pick when it happens.  I'm still running an 
Apache 1 server, and Apache 2 is installed there waiting for me to fix 
its config so it works with my sites.

So I don't think there's any magic to binary distros causing disruptive 
upgrades.  If Gentoo didn't cause disruption it's because they did a 
good job managing upgrades, not because it was a source distro.  I think 
Debian does as good a job as anyone managing upgrades in testing.  I 
hear they do a good job with dist-upgrades too but I've never done one. 
  And they really do a good job with dependency handling that allows 
them to come up with good plans for managing major transitions.

I'll repeat though: if apt et. al. tell you it's going to delete stuff 
you (should) care about and you go ahead, things will break.  Maybe 
there are users out there who shouldn't be exposed to that risk.

Dave