Hello. Yesterday I have upgraded my 20-computer lab to woody.
This was not a FAI-like "completely automated upgrade" but I used several tricks to make things easier. I used a local mini-distribution to make /var/lib/dpkg/available much smaller and reduce dpkg's load. Since every time I tried to upgrade using "apt-get upgrade" or "apt-get dist-upgrade", apt wanted to remove a lot of important packages (not in the package priority sense), I decided to use dselect this time. I first selected the packages in one computer, and then copied them to the others by using dpkg --get-selections/--set-selections. (These selections included also deselections of packages I knew they would be no longer required after the upgrade, like oldlibs, fake packages and such). The upgrade was done by using ssh as root and a lot of virtual consoles. I first started the upgrade in four computers, but at some point very early in the upgrade dpkg segfaulted. Since, at the same time, I wanted perl to be quiet about locales I tried again with LANG=C and this time dpkg did not segfault, so I strongly discourage not using LANG=C for upgrades from potato... I had to answer a lot of questions, but I deserve it for not increasing debconf priority level first... After I fixed the dpkg segfault problem I started the upgrade in 6 more computers, so after 1h 40min approximately, the upgrade was complete in half of the lab. Then I had a class and some of my students realized xterms changed to white letters over a black background. Apparently this is everything they noticed, so I considered the upgrade a success so far :-) After the class, for the remaining 10 computers, I copied config.dat and templates.dat in /var/cache/debconf to the not-yet-upgraded computers and this time the upgrade went more quickly, 1 hour approximately. (The computers were Pentium/150 with 32M RAM). I don't know whether copying these files to not-yet-upgraded computers is a documented procedure but maybe it should be, since it works great. During the upgrade I discovered how evil and annoying dpkg's conffile mechanism may be. We should really deprecate a lot of conffiles in favour of configuration files outside the .deb which are created by the postinst when they do not exist. According to policy, this is what should be done when there is not a default which satisfies everybody (for example, /etc/yp.conf). Anyway, the upgrade was smoother than I expected, so I'm very glad that it went so well. Thanks everybody. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
