Comment 46 for bug 427356

On Wed, 2009-09-16 at 00:55 +0000, Ryan wrote:

> 1. With all the functional package dependency issues, were they not all
> set in the debs? eg - How is it that some packages being available and
> some not allowed it to mangle so many systems in the field? Shouldn't it
> have held off trying to install any until all were in? Were the
> dependencies set incorrectly?
>
The core set of packages had a circular set of dependencies, involving
Essential/required packages. Unfortunately this meant if APT couldn't
see all of them at once, it did the wrong thing when using dist-upgrade.

The reason you couldn't see all of them at once is that the exact same
thing happened to the buildds, and they ended up being unable to
continue building the very packages they needed to unstick themselves.

> 2. With such a large change (touching so many areas) with such risk
> ('average' testers unable to boot/recover without a lot launchpad visits
> after rescue usb/cd)... Was this tested as set via a PPA etc first and
> somehow everyone running via the PPA just had zero issues? - Or was it
> direct to test on all the 'normal' alpha uses using the normal repos?
>
All of the updates were first tested in the ubuntu-boot PPA. No issues
were reported.

Even so, it's quite normal to directly test using the
development/unstable release - that's exactly what it's for. If you're
running the development/unstable release, you should expect regular
problems.

(Though compared to other distros, we seem to do a better job of holding
it all together)

Scott
--
Scott James Remnant
<email address hidden>