I spent a chunk of today looking into https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/924079, which was an attempted upgrade of an amd64 system with ia32-libs installed from oneiric to precise. It fails because libgcc1:i386 is not marked for unpack sufficiently early so it is unable to do immediate configuration on the :i386 dependency chain. This looks like it will affect all upgrades of amd64 systems that have any packages installed that need to become foreign-architecture packages in precise, which is going to be a lot of desktop systems.
I've determined that it's enough to backport the GSoC work on improved unpack/configure ordering, which applies unmodified to the version of apt in oneiric: http://paste.ubuntu.com/825133/ The question then seems to be how we can best arrange for oneiric users (at least those on amd64) to have this when they try to upgrade. We could publish a release-upgrader-apt package as we do for lucid, or we could try to SRU this into oneiric's apt directly. The former would only work for users of update-manager (this bug affects 'apt-get dist-upgrade' too), so I think we should aim for the latter if possible. Do people think this is plausible? It would probably be a moderate pain to validate, although I think it would be doable given the existence of automatic upgrade tests. As it stands, this patch breaks apt's ABI. I would strongly prefer not to do that in an SRU. Michael said he thought it might be possible to do this in a way that doesn't break ABI, which would be great. If we take the SRU route, we also need to ensure that update-manager installs the new apt from oneiric-updates before starting the upgrade. That looks reasonably straightforward, but I mention it for completeness. Thanks, -- Colin Watson [[email protected]] -- ubuntu-devel mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
