Hi Steve, On 10/2/22 21:26, Steve Langasek wrote:
I heartily endorse ubuntu-release-upgrader, it has been useful in addressing uncounted upgrade issues over the years and I think something like this would be a nice addition to Debian as well. Two caveats:- Despite this being the sanctioned upgrade path in Ubuntu for over a decade, every single cycle we get bug reports from users who have run into issues because they have bypassed it and done the manual sed /etc/apt/sources.list && apt dist-upgrade. So in Debian where this has been the norm for /two/ decades, I would not expect this to substantially reduce the error rate in the first release where such a mechanism is introduced. (After all, whether telling users to use a new upgrader tool or telling them to manually add a component to sources.list, they will have to read the release notes to know about it!) - There are always some users that end up with buggy systems after upgrade despite using the supported interface because they upgrade to the devel release, and the release-upgrader is still under development up until release so they miss out on quirks being applied - and there is no interface for users to replay the quirks that they missed out on. Don't repeat the same design mistake.
I very much dislike the Ubuntu approach, but not only because of the above. Also because this approach forgets the fact that we also maintain 2 rolling-updates distro (testing and unstable).
In the absence of a release-upgrader, the only way I see to automate this on upgrade would be to handle it in the maintainer scripts of either base-files (which I don't think the base-files maintainer would like) or apt.
If the base-files maintainer (ie: Santiago Vila) doesn't like doing things like this in "his" package, maybe we could have base-file >> 12.2 depend on another package (called non-free-upgrade?) that would do the work instead. We could even have only base-file to depend on that package for a single release (ie: only for the lifetime of bookworm, and we get rid of the package after the release).
I think that's an even better approach than having this done in base-files itself.
Your thoughts? Cheers, Thomas Goirand (zigo)
