Question about packages updating in Lenny
 

I know Lenny is still testing and only at beta stage. But today I brought up aptitude to check and see if there were any packages I didn't have already installed that I wanted. And I did an update. Well I see a bucket load of upgradeable packages. And I've got security updates unlisted so I could only be from a few sources. So I went through and deselected a few (didn't upgrade iceape or iceweasel as I use actual firefox, and held back acrobat to get all updates on 1 cd). and went ahead and upgraded those packages. And I see that most of the packages are coming from the debian.org repo. So it's the actual lenny repo and not like multimedia or one of the two other outside repos I have listed.

So my question is this. Being this is the first time I've worked with Debian testing and the first time I've loaded my system from the net, does this happen often during testing when it's close to rc time? When do they freeze packages? I think I know the answer but just want some confirmation from those more knowledgeable.

Does that mean you're not getting security updates? That would, of course, be foolish. ... And, real Debian users certainly use Iceweasel rather than Firefox. ... And, Yes, there are always lots of updates coming into Testing except during the freeze immediately before the conversion to Stable ... Testing is what's called a rolling release.

Oh don't start with that real debian users garbage. I cut my teeth on potato loaded from floppies. I prefer Firefox.

And I just proved my point in another post about making cds to install from my system using apt-move. I loaded those upgrades and if buggered up my x. Specifically my 3d and resolution. It was stuck at 1280 and 980. I could change it from the kde control center but dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg didn't even give the option to detect the hardward. Only the keyboard. I just finished doing a clean reload from my home made cd's to the system as it was. Just have ot reset guard dog now.

I wonder why. It can't be because there is some advantage ... they're the same.

Most Debian users are sharp enough to simply edit the xorg.conf file rather than bother with dpkg-reconfigure ... Certainly better than some kind of dance-around with moving packages to disk, then installing them from there. I wonder why others don't have those problems. Of course newbies and general incompetents do, but not most sophisticated Debian users.

I've just noticed that while you ask quite a few questions, you really have no interest in the answers...only in setting out to prove that you're smarter than the person who made a suggestion. Just thought I'd get my licks in ahead of time.

Yes, it happens often in Debian Testing, and usually I see 500-600 packages to be upgraded after a month or so.

Lenny might not be anywhere close to release, and then again it might be. It only becomes Stable when it is ready. And it is ready when it is ready not sooner. I heard rumours about Q4/2008.

Only after freeze the number of updates might decrease. Or not, as bug fixes are cranked out as much as possible.

The scary thing is that during such an upgrade packages might be removed as well if apt thinks it is necessary. Maybe it is harmless maybe not. Usually I behave cowardish and keep a Testing system around after installing until it becomes Stable and then I do a dist upgrade.

jlinkels

Ya know rick, piss off. It's arrogant to make such a statement. I came trying to learn something new. I have never run a testing install. I've been on a lowly dialup and finally got cable internet so thought I'd give it a go. I haven't been on here in a year or so so I have much to catch up on. But I do have my way of doing it. And it's just that. MY WAY. isn't that what linux is all about. If you don't like the way someone does it find a different way or make a way yourself. I am interrested in the answers, just not when someone tries to tell me you're ignorant or backwards doing it this way. I have my reasons for maintaining my system the way I do. It suits me. Deal with it. I've been used to just running stable and the upgrades like that threw me. It wasn't so much the upgrades as how it monkeyed my xorg.

Everyone here is learning or trying to learn. it's snooty comments like that that turn so many newbs off. So according to you I'm a general incompetent. Yeah, that's why I was hacking in Debian Sarge into a handful of old laptops, with full kernel recompiles and even custom hacks to get the docks to work, for a church. So take your elitist crap and try to rain on some other sucker. I know better. It's arses like you that give our movement a black eye.

rickh is right...cage, you need a different distro
 

Cage, you probably won't be comfortable with an ongoing changing lenny distro. Why not just stick with Mepis, Pardus, or Sidus, which attempt to "stabilize" the testing and sid branches, and you won't have to worry about ice weasel or the upgrades in the testing branch. You can use whichever repository you wish to use with those distros...debian stable, testing, or sid.

Oh, it's not being uncomfortable with a changing system. As long as it doesn't muck up the system as it is. I mean when I installed the first time it was Golden. But the upgrades to X botched it. The rest of the upgrades were fine. Like Open Office and the other tools. I think I'll just upgrade everything else but hold back my x upgrades. I can always revert the to the old pacakges if need be. Just I've got X working great and don't want that part screwed up again.

I've heard of Mepis but don't know much about it. I might look at it.

P.S. Love your sig >:D

Yes, testing is considered a rolling release, so it always gets updated. When a package in Sid (unstable) is hammered out enough so that it is "Release Candidate" quality, it moves into testing.
Yeah, same here too. Something's buggered up with that script. I'm sure there's a bug report floating around, just too lazy to go look for it. :) Expect it to be fixed in 1-2 weeks or so, depending on when the developers get around to it.
You sure about that? Considering the fiasco with the openssh maintainer, what else did the Debian developers try to "improve"? It's critical mistakes like that make me wonder on Debian's survival and whether or not I should use something like Slackware because the upstream vendor for a particular application isn't happy with the Debian maintainer's inappropriate "fixes".
Good for you! Now, are you going to post some type of link about it to contribute back to this thread or are you going to rant how you must do it "The Debian Way"? Your comments aren't helpful to the Debian community.
It's a Debian based distro that uses the Etch (stable) branch with a few customized packages such as an updated KDE, OpenOffice, linux kernel, etc. It comes on a LiveCD like Ubuntu and has a small, but very helpful and non-elitist community. http://mepislovers.org/forums/index.php

It's a neat distro & I think you'd like it.

Thank you angry. You helped to make my point more than I could fired up.

And now I see that I'm not the only one who had trouble with the x upgrades recently it validates my whole reason for making those cd's. Because I was able to restore my system back easily.

And my choice, which it is, my choice, to use Firefox proper instead of iceweasle is partly political. See when Mandriva fired Gael I also lost respect for the distro that originally took me from Debian. I was a Mandraker from 7.0. But was not liking the route Mandriva was taking. And it really irked me when that came down. That and the polish on Woody brought me back. So to see the Debian hierarchy make such an assinine move regarding Firefox for copywrite reasons doesn't sit well with me. Now it's their choice to do that. But it's equally my choice to reject it and keep Firefox. Like you said, what else did they change?

And originally yes I did manually edit my xorg.conf. I have a couple versions. the original installed on my system, one custom for 3d with the ati module and one custom for 3d with the radeon module. swapping them out made no difference. And I resorted to dpkg-reconfigure as a last resort. and lo no difference. This was similar to the problem, and the reason I did not stick with Kubuntu.

So I guess I'll be careful what upgrades I allow. I can rework just about anything but with the custom hacks I have in x I might hold them and let everything else upgrade.

But again angry, thanks for the backup in this and showing I wasn't the only one who had this problem and how much of an elitist arse Rick was.

Well, I understand that Debian does have to tamper with the source code so that they can backport security updates to the stable side. The reason is that if a new package is uploaded and it requires new dependencies, then it won't work with Etch. So the Debian devs need to be able to look at what was changed and apply those changes to the older packages and for a good 95% of the time, the system works pretty well. After all, the issue was with one developer, so perhaps I over-exaggerated a little bit. However, all changes should be uploaded back to the original maintainer. Debian guys complain about Ubuntu not uploading its patches, so Debian shouldn't follow the same behavior.

The issue with the Firefox thing is that Mozilla noticed that Debian applies its own custom patches to it. So therefore they went in and said, "You can't use our logos and brand unless you keep the source code as is." Now, this creates a problem because Debian needs to be able to apply these changes for its stable branch. The Debian guys couldn't kill firefox because it's widely used, so they simply god rid of the branding. The only issue that seems to be with Iceweasel is the inspector agent, some websites don't take well to "Iceweasel" as the identifier, so it has to be changed to "Firefox". In this case, I think the Debian guys made the right move, but the decision is always up to you on whether or not to use it.
At least you can hack X and linux kernels. I can't even do that! But that's ok, aptitude and 20000+ packages allows me to get away with my laziness. :)

Heh, you should have seen me in may 1998 when I got X working for the first time loading it from floppies. Talk about rude awakening. Then I didn't know WHAT the Hell I was doing. And when I took my first look at the alien file system I almost ran for the hills screaming. Until I did some reading.

And compiling a custom kernel really isn't hard. And if you think debian runs good loaded plain, just think how a lean kernel just for your box will run. All that crap that comes up at boot that has nothing to do with your system won't.

That's a pretty silly argument. You assume that upstream development is perfect, and that's obviously not so. Do you have lots of other examples of Debian patches harming an otherwise ideal upstream app?

What happened to the openssh seeding was a big fuck up, but if you read around more, you will see that (1) the Debian maintainer was trying to fix a problem with the upstream package and (2) he wrote their mailing list with questions and describing what he planned to but they also failed to notice the problem the fix would cause. See this link for further details: http://wiki.debian.org/SSLkeys#head-...f4205325c85819

Actually Iceweasel is an improved version of Firefox. Don't remember the exact bugs that Mozilla has refused to recognize as problems and bother to fix through the years, but Debian DID fix them. Having had assorted problems with Firefox on both Windows and other distros and having experienced Iceweasel, with the user agent switcher extension for jerky websites, I can say that the experience has been superior. Maybe placebo, but I don't think so.

The dpkg-reconfigure problem is not a bug, but a "feature." In xorg-xserver-1.4 (xorg 7.3 and above) the video settings are now supposed to be all automatically detected and applied based upon what xorg reads from the driver and video hardware. XRandR can be used to adjust the resolution. Things like the Composite extension still need to be manually edited in but we're supposed to be able to not need to add any specific video settings in there. In reality it is not able to compensate for inaccurate monitor reports of screen size and refresh rates or able to give the user the ability to select custom settings.

They just took that stuff out of dpkg-reconfigure, and users have been reporting that manually adding in settings at times does nothing as xorg is ignoring what the user edits into xorg.conf.

There have been discussions I have seen in both the Debian and Ubuntu forums and users have figured out ways to generate modelines through nvidia-settings and manually applying them successfully. I forget exactly, but something I think is called jte (?), a part of X, can also be used to generate a modelines section that corrects for not automatically detected settings.

And, I like rickh and think he offers a great deal to the community. Quite forceful in his opinions, which rankles some, but he's always supported his opinions with valid arguments at some time in a thread or two. When encountering a response where he doesn't fully go into it, just waxing poetic about what he perceives as users ignoring the easy Debian ways to do their own thing and then (surprise!) having problems, I can see where a user can get a bit peeved.

For me, I'd rather not check every update. By sticking to established Debian practices, such as those that our outspoken rickh recommends from time to time, I've found that aptitude full-upgrade daily has never broken a thing on my system. Just lucky? I haven't had that kind of success when doing the same on other distros. In general, when Debian releases something into testing it works. It's just that at times the ways to configure things have undergone changes so we need to learn the new tricks. I'd rather proceed into the future than try to manage a system mixed up with older packages. Almost guaranteed that something will break that way.

What peeved me is his higher than thou attitude and assumption that I am an ignorant newbie. There are more than a few ways to do the same tasks in Linux. To each his own. I have my way of doing things for a reason. And one is that the detected settings do NOT give the correct resolution. This could be why Kubuntu just wouldn't configure. And this is probably why I couldn't fix X after the upgrade. This is something I will look into. But it would have been better to have been told that by rich rather than his rankor. See now you've given me something to actually work with. And as I was pointing out this was my first go at running a testing distro on my box. So I was asking for just those kind of pointers.

Not that I agree with what they did but that's another issue now. But I've used Firefox proper for quite some time with no complaints.

See I can change the resolutions in the kde control center for each user but it doesn't fix the initial startup where the logon screen is squished due to the inaccurate resolution. And this is one of two dell monitors that I use and the same result so it's not a hardware issue. Gotta link to some of these discussions? I'd like to see the banter.