On Wednesday, March 5, 2025 12:34:27 PM MST Marc Haber wrote: > On Wed, Mar 05, 2025 at 06:29:26PM +0100, Matthias Urlichs wrote: > >Noticing the one change among the umpteen more-or-less-major NEWS > >entries that actually affects the ability of your system to safely > >reboot with the same network configuration is not a trivial task, even > >for reasonably experienced sysadmins. > > It is also a challenge for a package maintainer to judge WHEN to drop > a higher priority NEWS entry. > > I think that our release notes recommend one or another way for console > access for upgrades for exactly this reason.
I would not be opposed to some type of special warning that an upgrade would break remote access on a particular machine if it were possible to produce the warning reliably, but I don't think it would be that easy to implement. Sometimes it might be easy to detect, but I think a lot of times it isn't easy for Debian to know when the change will cause breakage or not, and if people become dependent on these warnings instead of actually reading the release notes and the NEWS entries, then I can see this causing more problems than it solves. If you are doing an upgrade on a remote or headless system, it probably behooves your time to read over the release notes and the NEWS entries to understand how changes may affect your connectivity. As a human you are much more likely to know if the change will break remote access than any automated check Debian can produce. Now, if any of the breakages being discussed were not sufficiently documented in the release notes or NEWS entries, that is a different issue and one which should probably be addressed directly to the package that made the breaking change. -- Soren Stoutner so...@debian.org
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