I've just completed an upgrade to Debian 1.2, and would like to
relate some details of the experience in the hopes that it might
help others who get stuck as I did. I also have some suggestions
for the maintainers at the end of this message. But before I get
to any of that, I want to say "thanks".
I've been using Debian since the early 0.93 days, and while it's
never been perfect, it has always been better than anything else
out there. I have installed both Windows and Debian a number of
times and I'm still shocked that Debian is easier. Thanks to
everyone who has contributed to this!
I have been using the dselect ftp access method to add or upgrade
packages to my system for some time now, and in general have had
no problems with it. So I decided to use it for the upgrade to 1.2.
While upgrading, a number of packages (about 10 of the over 100)
failed to install. The result of this was that after the first
round of attempted installations of the new/updated packages, the
ftp access method for dselect no longer worked.
This was very disconcerting!
I really didn't want to restore from backup, and start over again,
so I took a shot at using the "mounted" access method to access
the package files that the "ftp" method had just downloaded. A
little "find"-ing found the .deb files in
/var/lib/dpkg/methods/ftp/debian/Debian-1.2/binary-i386/...,
and it only took a couple of attempts to properly answer
"mounted"'s querys for the location of the files it needed.
(Thanks to whoever decided that the files downloaded by the ftp
access method should be stored in a way acceptable to the mounted
access method.) The only hitch was that I had to add a link from
/var/lib/dpkg/methods/ftp/debian/stable to Debian-1.2.
My assumption was that running install again over the same .deb
files would produce the same results, but at least I could
look at the errors, and make some guesses about how to fix them.
I was wrong. About 3/4 of the packages that failed to install the
first time, installed the second time. Running install yet again
got the last few installed. While I'm happy with the result, this
seems to me to indicate some missing dependencies somewhere.
I now have a working 1.2 system, and am happily writing this message
there on. I hope the previous paragraphs are helpful to anyone
who gets stuck as I did.
The following is some suggestions for the Debian maintainers.
In the above I would have liked to be more specific about what failed
and how, but I did not keep a written log, and apparently dselect didn't
either. I'd like to suggest that dselect keep a transcript of what
it attempts to do and whatever messages that attempt produces.
I noted that many packages printed warning messages and advice as
they were installed or configured. This works fine when your just
upgrading a single package, but when your upgrading 100 or so packages,
these messages just scroll off the screen never to be seen again. The
aforementioned transcript would help here too, but I'd rather see such
advice and recommendations put into a readme.debian file in a
/use/doc/packageX/.... file so it can be reread later easily.
Again, thanks for your efforts.
-gavin...
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