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whenever I try dist-upgrade in Debian et al. I always end up blowing up something. Back this up with examples, please. I use Debian since potato and can't rem

whenever I try dist-upgrade in Debian et al. I always end up blowing up something. Back this up with examples, please. I use Debian since potato and can't remember dist-upgrade failing me once.

creshal 11y ago
One example I vividly remember was Lenny → Squeeze. • Apache was installed, but stopped for the upgrade (resource-constrained device, I figured I'd better free up the memory up front). • Apache's preinstall script tried to stop it anyway • The old init script returned exit code 1 when trying to stop an already stopped service (PID not found, well duh) • …and the preinstall script used set -e • …and was called in the middle of a full dist-upgrade, that among other things installed binary-incompatible library upgrades, so after apt bailed out, it wouldn't start any more. In the end I just wiped the machine. Haven't seen it happening since, but apt/dpkg is way, way more anal than pacman when it detects problems, which usually gets in the way of fixing them (ex.: package didn't list a dependency it needs in its pre-/post-install-script → dpkg gets in an endless loop where it tries to re-execute said script and dies before it gets to installing the dependency).
vacri 11y ago
I'm an aptitude user, but I learned the hard way that you need to switch to apt-get to do a dist-upgrade. Something broke. Can't recall what it was - I think I was dist-upgrading to Squeeze, so it was a while back.
Borealid 11y ago
One time I had MIT Kerberos installed. The /etc/krb5.conf file had been edited. The dist-upgrade included an upgrade of the mit-krb5 RPMs. One of those RPMs had a %postinstall that ran a sed command on the krb5.conf, to try to change a setting. The sed command, run on the krb5.conf I had in place, blew away half the file. That krb5.conf was necessary for users to log in; after the dist-upgrade, neither SSH nor local logins worked properly because the pam module bailed out entirely.

whenever I try dist-upgrade in Debian et al. I always end up blowing up something. Back this up with examples, please. I use Debian since potato and can't remember dist-upgrade failing me once.

creshal 11y ago

One example I vividly remember was Lenny → Squeeze. • Apache was installed, but stopped for the upgrade (resource-constrained device, I figured I'd better free up the memory up front). • Apache's preinstall script tried to stop it anyway • The old init script returned exit code 1 when trying to stop an already stopped service (PID not found, well duh) • …and the preinstall script used set -e • …and was called in the middle of a full dist-upgrade, that among other things installed binary-incompatible library upgrades, so after apt bailed out, it wouldn't start any more. In the end I just wiped the machine. Haven't seen it happening since, but apt/dpkg is way, way more anal than pacman when it detects problems, which usually gets in the way of fixing them (ex.: package didn't list a dependency it needs in its pre-/post-install-script → dpkg gets in an endless loop where it tries to re-execute said script and dies before it gets to installing the dependency).

vacri 11y ago

I'm an aptitude user, but I learned the hard way that you need to switch to apt-get to do a dist-upgrade. Something broke. Can't recall what it was - I think I was dist-upgrading to Squeeze, so it was a while back.

Borealid 11y ago

One time I had MIT Kerberos installed. The /etc/krb5.conf file had been edited. The dist-upgrade included an upgrade of the mit-krb5 RPMs. One of those RPMs had a %postinstall that ran a sed command on the krb5.conf, to try to change a setting. The sed command, run on the krb5.conf I had in place, blew away half the file. That krb5.conf was necessary for users to log in; after the dist-upgrade, neither SSH nor local logins worked properly because the pam module bailed out entirely.