weird update problems

[Gabriel Dragffy]

Richard Mancusi wrote:

> There are obviously several ways to do your updates.  In my case I use
> Update Manager or simply wait for the notification.  In both cases you
> end up the same place.  A gui that breaks the updates into categories.
> e.g. Proposed, Backport, Important Security, etc.  An argument can be
> made to ignore or wait for many of these categories.  But I fail to see
> the logic behind ignoring "Important Security Updates".  The updates in
> question today were part of these security updates.  As a user we should
> be all over those.  And if you are the administrator of a corporate system
> that fails because you ignored those updates you should be fired.
> 
> The real question is how do updates in that category get released
> without adequate testing.  Yes, we are human and make mistakes.  But
> this is not the first time that this has happened.  This forces all of us
> to ignore security updates until proven sound.  But if we all ignore them
> they will never be proven anything.  Note the infinite loop.
> 

Right, right, I'll be the first to put my hand up and say that most of 
the real damage was done by my hand. My (lame) excuse is that I had 
installed a lot of software from source, and I thought that this had 
somehow screwed apt, I never dreamt that the actual kernels packages in 
the ubuntu repos were mashed. Sure in this case it is my fault, but how 
on earth can you excuse mashing the kernel packages. I've had a lot of 
faith in Ubuntu and its crew - believing what they always said - that 
the main repos was the only one that would be guaranteed. Seems like 
they can't even guarantee a kernel these days. I would like to point 
out, that I do realize I made over-zealous use of the sudo + aptitude 
commands.