> One reason may be that I just don't have as many packages installed, > but I was wondering if anybody had any other explainations as to why many > small incremental upgrades over the months seems to be more stable (in the > sense of installations not breaking) than making larger leaps from > point release to point release.
A lot of the problems seem to be dependency related. By upgrading, we need to install packages A, B, C, and D, but C needs to be installed before B, and D before C. So but if some of the depends don't catch it, the installation may fail the first (or second times) until D is install, and then C is installed. I had a problem with tcsh and csh. Both were scheduled for upgrade, but the old versions conflicted with the new. I ended up deinstalling tcsh, so that csh would upgrade, then reselecting tcsh to be installed, which seemed to work. In addition, by upgrading slowing, you would have installed D when it came along, around the same time as the package maintainer of C installed on his machine to make the new package for C. You won't run into this problem since by the time C comes out, you had already installed D. > I'd really like to hear that my observation is indeed false, since > upgradability is, of course, one of our major claims for Debian. This is one of the biggest problems with Debian, but it is inherent with any system with interactive programs, especially with the large number of different people working on packages that affect several other packages. Some of this can be fixed with beta upgrades, but hopefully the xxx-fixed will be able to help keep it staight(er). One other reason, by upgrading slowly, if a package fails, the error and what has changed may be a little more obvious. With a large upgrade, the interaction be less obvious. Also, some of the 'obvious' errors are less obvious when other errors are concurrent. Hence some of the 'Never mind, I answered my own stupid question posts'. Mark W. Blunier -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
