Hi Enrico,
Dist upgrade is something I'd prefer to do in a terminal muxer, e.g.,
tmux, screen, zellij, or wrappers like byobu. Even if the whole
desktop environment crashed during the upgrade, you can still check
the status in tty without losing the process handling the stdout/err
of apt.
I think apt/dpkg are well-designed to be failure/fault-proof. In my
memory I did lots of reboot/poweroff during apt upgrade since forgotten.
Powerloss is also safe in my experience, which is also discussed in the
dpkg fsync() on -devel concurrently.
Back to gnome crash -- I did not encounter desktop crash during the
past 6 years of using Debian Sid as daily drive. Maybe there is
something wrong in detecting which service (like gdm) needs a restart?
On 12/29/24 12:20, Enrico Zini wrote:
Hello,
today I decided to upgrade from bookworm to trixie/testing[1][2]. I ran
the upgrade in a gnome-terminal, and of course all gnome terminals in
the system crashed halfway through the upgrade[1][3].
Unexpectedly, apt and dpkg kept doing their thing in their own headless
wonderland. I tried to track progress via top and pstree, killed a
couple of whiptail processes[4], and eventually decided to kill apt and
restart things from a new terminal.
I'm not sure how to start reporting bugs here. gnome-terminal should
clearly not have crashed (and I do not know why it did, and I'm not sure
I want to go through all the trouble to setup a bullworm[2] VM with
gnome and upgrade it to trixie to see if it crashed again.
At the same time, it was surprising that apt and dpkg continued unfazed
after the terminal died. That may be easier to reproduce: start doing
something with apt and kill gnome-terminal. I still need a bookseye[2]
VM with gnome to try that out, and I have an annoying cold, so it's not
something I'd embark on right this afternoon[5].
Not sure there's much more to be done here, given the complexity of the
whole stack, and especially if this affected just me just this once. If
it doesn't, this mail can act a friendly "hey, it wasn't just you" for a
fellow traveler.
Trixie otherwise just works, and thank us all for it! <3
Enrico
[1] One reason was to see if gnome is less infuriating[3]
[2] One reason was to finally get out of release names starting with
'b', which have been confusing the hell out of me for half of a
decade
[3] Spoiler warning: not particularly
[4] Likely warnings that this or that go or rust program or qt chromium
embedding monster cannot be supported by the Security Team, for
which I have heartfelt support and which however stopped the
upgrade flow at least 5 times
[5] Do we have a thing that clones the running system into a throwaway
VM?
