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It seems to me that the author's system was in an incredibly unstable state to begin with. He's running a Debian prerelease with an unsupported filesystem, that

It seems to me that the author's system was in an incredibly unstable state to begin with. He's running a Debian prerelease with an unsupported filesystem, that had gone without updates for months at a time. I have a hard time seeing how changing the init system would not cause problems in a setup like that.

CoffeeDregs 12y ago
Agreed. I run Debian Testing and was able to upgrade ~5 machines without a hitch. Yes, I do have some odd behavior with the brightness key (but only when a second display is plugged in...), but I'm running Testing so I'm happy to trade an occasional annoyance for more recent packages. The biggest problem I've had with systemd (I now have about 200 machines running it/Jessie) is that I tend to blame everything on systemd... DHCP problems on boot! Must be systemd! (It wasn't...)
- keithpeter 12y ago
  Yup, let's face it, RedHat have bet the farm on systemd and the facilities/programs that go with it, so it will have to work and work well for 10+ years minimum. RHEL7 and the clones have systemd v208. Debian Testing just had v215 arrive. Freeze is quite soon, so it looks like 215 will be the systemd version that ships, so the packagers will have to backport security fixes to it for the life of Jessie (say 2 years or so). Just wondering how much work that will be if systemd continues to iterate at the speed it is doing... PS: why so many 'machines' (desktop clients, workstations?) running an unstable Debian I'm idly wondering...
javert 12y ago
I don't understand why people would choose a non rolling-release distro (e.g. Debian) over a rolling release distro (e.g. Arch). Because the former come with the implicit guarantee that every few months, you have to update EVERYTHING all at once. Seems like a needless risk and pain. Genuinely curious here. There must be an upside to this model, can someone tell me what it is?
- dmm 12y ago
  Debian upgrades are highly tested. A breakage going from a old-stable to stable release is usually considered a release blocking bug. Arch is great but it breaks all the time. They make major changes that are only documented on the blog. It's very different.
  - javert 12y ago
    > Arch is great but it breaks all the time. My arch install literally never breaks. I haven't had any problems at all for years.
- VLM 12y ago
  Debian Testing branch is always rolling except for a couple weeks/months before a freeze for a release. I suppose if you really needed to keep rolling you could temporarily switch to unstable. "Seems like a needless risk and pain." And the purpose of the freeze is to iron all that out so it doesn't happen. (edited to add, I'm sad seeing OP get downvoted. His post history shows hes an Arch guy and likely genuinely doesn't understand release tagging. As a Debian user since '97 I am not surprised that there exist both people who don't know the peculiar arcana of release tagging and there are people who are experts at it, so his confusion adds a little value to the conversation. Down arrow should mean a decrement of net worth of the conversation. People are learning things from his mistake, a down arrow is not an assessment that OP got a technical test question wrong. And I had to edit this about ten times to phrase it correctly.)
  - javert 12y ago
    I don't know much about Debian. I may have slightly mischaracterized things because I don't understand. That's why I asked. I am getting the impression that Debian Testing isn't really used in the sense of, "Be a nice volunteer and run this thing that has problems so we can fix them," which is what (to me) is implied by the name "testing." Rather, it seems to be "here is a (mostly) rolling release version of Debian, if that's what you want." In other words, it almost seems like "Debian Rolling" might be a more apt name, in a sense. The thing is, as a user of Arch Linux (without a ton of other experience), I just don't have problems with a rolling release. For me, things don't break, and it just works. So it feels to me like Debian's whole release philosophy is based around the idea that things have to break all the time and be fixed carefully, and that just doesn't sync up with my experience. So I'm trying to figure out what is missing from my worldview. Thanks for defending me. I think might be somebody (maybe multiple) who doesn't like me and just downvotes all my comments, but I don't have any hard evidence.
XorNot 12y ago
Funny. I upgraded my ZFS laptop to Utopic with systemd, and everything is more or less fine. There's a few residual issues - I need to install the ZFS targets since zfs-mount doesn't quite have the right mount order (but that's been a problem since well before ZFS hence using zfs-mountall). But otherwise everything else basically just worked.
mverwijs 12y ago
> He's running a Debian prerelease with an unsupported filesystem I'd say he was dogfooding, given that he's a Debian developer. (Edit: fix typo)
vacri 12y ago
It's worth mentioning both that Debian Testing is not called 'stable' because, in their own words, there are occasional significant breakages. It's also worth mentioning that right now, Debian Testing is being prepped for a freeze to become Debian Stable in less than a month, and it's absolutely chaotic as everyone is applying patches all over the place to get them in before the freeze. After the freeze there'll be two months to sort out critical bugs like the ones in the article, but this possibly wasn't the best time to do a big upgrade of an edge-case system. Well, unless you want to find and report bugs :)
- e12e 12y ago
  > it's absolutely chaotic as everyone is applying patches all over the place to get them in before the freeze. No, it's not. That said, if you want to run Debian testing, do yourself a favour and also install apt-listbugs -- it'll hook into apt, and alert if the update has any bugs filed against it (the update you are installing, that is). I recently moved my laptop from Debian/stable w/backports to Jessie (testing) -- and it's been fine (had to do a reinstall anyway due to shifting around partitions, because I needed more space for windows so I could create an installer for windows 8.1 -- didn't have enough free space to ... don't get me started).

CoffeeDregs 12y ago

Agreed. I run Debian Testing and was able to upgrade ~5 machines without a hitch. Yes, I do have some odd behavior with the brightness key (but only when a second display is plugged in...), but I'm running Testing so I'm happy to trade an occasional annoyance for more recent packages. The biggest problem I've had with systemd (I now have about 200 machines running it/Jessie) is that I tend to blame everything on systemd... DHCP problems on boot! Must be systemd! (It wasn't...)

keithpeter 12y ago
Yup, let's face it, RedHat have bet the farm on systemd and the facilities/programs that go with it, so it will have to work and work well for 10+ years minimum. RHEL7 and the clones have systemd v208. Debian Testing just had v215 arrive. Freeze is quite soon, so it looks like 215 will be the systemd version that ships, so the packagers will have to backport security fixes to it for the life of Jessie (say 2 years or so). Just wondering how much work that will be if systemd continues to iterate at the speed it is doing... PS: why so many 'machines' (desktop clients, workstations?) running an unstable Debian I'm idly wondering...

javert 12y ago

I don't understand why people would choose a non rolling-release distro (e.g. Debian) over a rolling release distro (e.g. Arch). Because the former come with the implicit guarantee that every few months, you have to update EVERYTHING all at once. Seems like a needless risk and pain. Genuinely curious here. There must be an upside to this model, can someone tell me what it is?

dmm 12y ago
Debian upgrades are highly tested. A breakage going from a old-stable to stable release is usually considered a release blocking bug. Arch is great but it breaks all the time. They make major changes that are only documented on the blog. It's very different.
- javert 12y ago
  > Arch is great but it breaks all the time. My arch install literally never breaks. I haven't had any problems at all for years.
VLM 12y ago
Debian Testing branch is always rolling except for a couple weeks/months before a freeze for a release. I suppose if you really needed to keep rolling you could temporarily switch to unstable. "Seems like a needless risk and pain." And the purpose of the freeze is to iron all that out so it doesn't happen. (edited to add, I'm sad seeing OP get downvoted. His post history shows hes an Arch guy and likely genuinely doesn't understand release tagging. As a Debian user since '97 I am not surprised that there exist both people who don't know the peculiar arcana of release tagging and there are people who are experts at it, so his confusion adds a little value to the conversation. Down arrow should mean a decrement of net worth of the conversation. People are learning things from his mistake, a down arrow is not an assessment that OP got a technical test question wrong. And I had to edit this about ten times to phrase it correctly.)
- javert 12y ago
  I don't know much about Debian. I may have slightly mischaracterized things because I don't understand. That's why I asked. I am getting the impression that Debian Testing isn't really used in the sense of, "Be a nice volunteer and run this thing that has problems so we can fix them," which is what (to me) is implied by the name "testing." Rather, it seems to be "here is a (mostly) rolling release version of Debian, if that's what you want." In other words, it almost seems like "Debian Rolling" might be a more apt name, in a sense. The thing is, as a user of Arch Linux (without a ton of other experience), I just don't have problems with a rolling release. For me, things don't break, and it just works. So it feels to me like Debian's whole release philosophy is based around the idea that things have to break all the time and be fixed carefully, and that just doesn't sync up with my experience. So I'm trying to figure out what is missing from my worldview. Thanks for defending me. I think might be somebody (maybe multiple) who doesn't like me and just downvotes all my comments, but I don't have any hard evidence.

XorNot 12y ago

Funny. I upgraded my ZFS laptop to Utopic with systemd, and everything is more or less fine. There's a few residual issues - I need to install the ZFS targets since zfs-mount doesn't quite have the right mount order (but that's been a problem since well before ZFS hence using zfs-mountall). But otherwise everything else basically just worked.

mverwijs 12y ago

> He's running a Debian prerelease with an unsupported filesystem I'd say he was dogfooding, given that he's a Debian developer. (Edit: fix typo)

vacri 12y ago

It's worth mentioning both that Debian Testing is not called 'stable' because, in their own words, there are occasional significant breakages. It's also worth mentioning that right now, Debian Testing is being prepped for a freeze to become Debian Stable in less than a month, and it's absolutely chaotic as everyone is applying patches all over the place to get them in before the freeze. After the freeze there'll be two months to sort out critical bugs like the ones in the article, but this possibly wasn't the best time to do a big upgrade of an edge-case system. Well, unless you want to find and report bugs :)

e12e 12y ago
> it's absolutely chaotic as everyone is applying patches all over the place to get them in before the freeze. No, it's not. That said, if you want to run Debian testing, do yourself a favour and also install apt-listbugs -- it'll hook into apt, and alert if the update has any bugs filed against it (the update you are installing, that is). I recently moved my laptop from Debian/stable w/backports to Jessie (testing) -- and it's been fine (had to do a reinstall anyway due to shifting around partitions, because I needed more space for windows so I could create an installer for windows 8.1 -- didn't have enough free space to ... don't get me started).