jlecour, 7 months ago

@juliank Hi. Isn't it possible to still use "apt upgrade" with those options (--without-new-pkgs and --with-new-pkgs) and get the same result ?

juliank, 7 months ago

@jlecour Well yes, that's a single option with yes/no values and apt upgrade just changes the default to yes so you can pass --without-new-pkgs to disable it again.

Anarcat, 8 months ago

@juliank any reason why "quirks" are out of scope? that seems to be the main challenge in our automation here...

juliank, 8 months ago

@Anarcat Out of scope for the blog post but they surely would be the main feature of release-upgrade.

juliank, 8 months ago

@Anarcat Basically I want to sit down with ubuntu-release-upgrader, identify the categories of quirks, extract common ones into a declarative format and have the other in presumably shell scripts because we can't rely on python being present.

Or we could install Python during the upgrade and remove it after.

Anarcat, 8 months ago

@juliank that sounds fantastic. and yeah, baseline is tricky, although i rarely find systems without Python installed...

Anarcat, 8 months ago

@juliank ideally, of course, all quirks would be fixed in debian packages themselves, but we both know that will never actually happen :)

juliank, 8 months ago

@Anarcat You might need solver quirks too.

Consider the situation I expressed recently on #debian-devel where you could have

linux-image-$foo Depends linux-headers-$foo | missing-headers

and you make dkms

Conflicts: missing-headers

to get the effect that you need headers installed for all kernels you have installed.

However this is probably impossible for the current solver and my proposed one would backtrack to much.

So you'd add a quirk installing all headers for all kernels.

juliank, 8 months ago

@Anarcat That is, sometimes dependencies get too complex that the solver can't really handle them and it's good if we can express hints there.

It would be good to have that on all upgrades though, not just release upgrades.

Anarcat, 8 months ago

@juliank yeah, that was one thing that crossed my mind reading the post: why is this specific to major upgrades?

Anarcat, 8 months ago

@juliank i'm excited by a "release-upgrade" command in Debian! i'm maintaining a wiki page trying to build a specification for such a command, and known alternatives, so I have added a link to your blog post there https://wiki.debian.org/AutomatedUpgrade

juliank, 8 months ago

@ariadne I guess apk doesn't have this problem in the first place and a given world always results in the same packages being installed?