Upgrading to Edgy Eft

[Mario Vukelic]

On Wed, 2006-06-28 at 16:03 -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:
> You keep saying that, but there's _nothing_ in the wiki to imply just what
> this "merging state" entails, so I simply can't question anybody's desire
> to use edgy as it exists. 

What became of "know what you are doing, else ask"? I dunno, when I
started to use Debian, 7 or so years ago, I initially also had little
idea about stable/unstable. I still managed to understand that running
the unstable version is recommended only if you can dig yourself out of
a hole. After I felt at home with how the distro works (and was bored by
stable) I ran unstable (which I repeat, is much more benevolent in
Debian than Ubuntu)

Shouldn't people at least read the Edgy release notes (found on google
for "edgy release notes") before trying to upgrade to Edgy? I have
posted excerpts elsewhere in this thread. Are they in any way unclear?

>  If it is _so_ unstable, the archive should not
> be open.  

There are people working on it. There are people who want to run it,
some to report issues, some only out of curiosity. And so on. As I
repeatedly said, nobody wants to prevent people from running edgy, if
they know what this means.

This does not mean that it is a good idea to run it for someone who is
mainly interested in a working computer. It is "unstable", how explicit
does it need to be?

> The merging process should not actually be that unstable 

Why? IMHO all parts of the process shall be exactly as benefits
development most. I suppose most of the time the maintainers try to
avoid breaking it, but sometimes it just happens, and sometimes early on
they might not even care so much.

> (and
> from what I've seen so far, it really isn't - yes I ran into a showstopper
> libc6 problem, but it didn't cripple the system, just a couple of important
> apps).

Random link from first page on google for "dapper broken":
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=414837

Derek, a new X will arrive (7.1) and a new toolchain will arrive (gcc
4.1), a new minor kernel version even (2.6.17) and all kinds of other
highly invasive changes https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/edgy/+specs
You are kidding yourself if you think it won't break, it is practically
guaranteed.

All that said, of course it is possible to safely run edgy: think before
you apply updates (when that broken dependency tries to remove libc6),
read the mailinglist (to be aware of what's going on and to see breakage
warnings before it is too late), know how to massage apt, be able to
help yourself without X, have a LiveCD and another pc with internet
connection handy, don't rely on the machine that runs edgy. You can run
it chrooted, or in a virtual machine.

Failing any or all of this you can be lucky, or the experience can be
very painful.

> Yes it's been discussed - but there's a whole line of people lining up
> behind Alexander telling us to keep our edgy posts off this list. 

This was clarified by Oliver Grawert as far as I am concerned, and
Alexander also retracted his statement that edgy questions should go to
-devel.

Personally I'd prefer a -users-unstable list, I think the mailinglist
otherwise becomes much too hard to digest for non-experts, also because
the edgy users hanging out here foreseeably will be too quick pointing
absolute newbies to an unreleased edgy. 

There is a reason why Dapper is called 6.06 LTS, and for why edgy is
called Edgy Eft, yet you have already stated somewhere in this thread
that users should be encouraged to use edgy. I disagree very much with
this. Yes, there are cases where they should (let's say their hardware
is not supported in dapper but only in edgy, and they are fine with
running an unstable version), but this does not allow a blanket
statement "users should be encouraged". And even for these cases, this
time is probably not now.
 Once again I refer you to the edgy release notes where Mark
Shuttleworth wrote that even after edgy is _released, the distro of
choice for people who want "just works" is 6.06 LTS (Dapper).

>  They
> certainly give the impression of being angry and bitter to me.

I don't get this vibe

>   And that's
> making _me_ angry and bitter.

You should know better, it's a mailing list :)