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The perils of upgrading

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To start with I was using the stable sarge distribution and everything was running nicely. Proftpd had started off responding slowly but seemed to sort itself out somehow. I could log into the machine from work using ssh and the webserver was fast.

Purely because I wanted to install php5 from the unstable distribution did I add the source to my sources.list, which caused aptitude to flag many packages for an upgrade, on the whole held back at the stable versions. Somehow this got very confused when I tried to install php5 and associated stuff, where some things got upgraded, and other things were uninstalled for no particular reason (such as gnome and kde). I think I ended up with an unstable system eventually, and apt did work pretty well, but now the system is configured somewhat differently. Apache 2 has gone sluggish and so has proftpd. I can't seem to access the ssh server. This morning I found the X server had died overnight.

Clearly, I'll have to do some work to get back to where I was, but originally I wanted to leave most of the system intact and just install php5! I can't really blame apt as I let it take control, but it is definitely worth being careful about what you let it do, and the dependency handling can do some apparently perverse things, which doesn't help when you are fairly inexperienced.

There's also something to be said for the stable distribution, because it worked really well.

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Re: The perils of upgrading

Submitted by IntnsRed on Mon, 2006-09-04 08:04.

Quote:
There's also something to be said for the stable distribution, because it worked really well.

Bingo! Two points:

•  For a long time I went through the phase of "needing" the latest, greatest software versions (in particular, KDE). That caused countless amounts of pain. Call me a cynic, but I've found that those latest, greatest versions are usually not really necessary.

Now when I want a change to KDE, I change my desktop wallpaper and theme. :-)

•  There are a lot of low level interactions between software packages that can cause all sorts of problems. Diagnosing low level problems is not for the faint of heart.

The Debian maintainers spend a helluva lot of time and effort on getting things right. That time is spent mired in deep technical swamps full of tiny, biting mosquitos.

I've seen other distros that "paper over" these problems by just releasing another version. Sometimes that will "fix" things, sometimes it doesn't.

I think there's a lot to be said in favor of the Debian approach.

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As I said, I would have been

Submitted by scumble on Mon, 2006-09-04 08:53.

As I said, I would have been happy with installing php5, which is the only thing I actually needed. I'm wondering whether I should try and get back to a mostly stable setup, but I'm not sure of the best way of approaching the problem.

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Do you have a backup from

Submitted by Matt on Mon, 2006-09-04 09:42.

Do you have a backup from before the upgrade? That has saved me more than once, like when I botched the upgrade of Xfree86 to xorg in unstable.

Maybe someone around here knows how to pull off a miracle, like the equivalent of
# apt-get dist-downgrade

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I hadn't really worked out

Submitted by scumble on Mon, 2006-09-04 10:05.

I hadn't really worked out how to do a system backup, but I'm at the stage where a re-install isn't out of the question - I've not done a huge amount of customisation, so it may be an idea to restart before I spend too much time fiddling about fruitlessly. Perhaps one error was installing more than the base system. May have been better to install the components I wanted step by step.

However, I haven't had a chance to really look at what has happened yet. I may just need to do a few configuration tasks.

It's a lot easier to do things in smaller steps rather than a complete upgrade, because too much changes otherwise.

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PHP5 in Stable/Sarge

Submitted by IntnsRed on Mon, 2006-09-04 19:48.

Quote:
I would have been happy with installing php5, which is the only thing I actually needed.

There is the unofficial DotDeb repository of LAMP stuff for Sarge/Stable that contains PHP5. But FWIW, I've never had much luck with it.

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apt.config man page

Submitted by tricky on Tue, 2006-09-05 02:03.

what you want to do is take a look at apt.config's man page, it explains how to do exactly what you need, but then you'll be running a mixed system. Of course if it starts failing, then you simply uninstall the offending package and reinstall using stable.

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So why is it that services

Submitted by scumble on Mon, 2006-09-04 13:34.

So why is it that services can suddenly get so slow? Webmin is also running like a dog for no particular reason. Even ssh over the local network is slow - it's no wonder I couldn't log in from work...

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