[svlug] Report From LinuxWorld

[George Bonser]

> I've yet to see this happen in the normal case (ie stable), tho I
> recall a message to debian-news from Joey Hess a couple years ago
> during the perl 5.004 migration (?!?) that cought a few folks in
> stable unawares.

It was a kinda two-part thing if memory serves, there was a problem with
dselect (apt was not widely used at that point) where one had to manually
install glibc (migrating from linux libc to glibc ... libc5 to
libc6) first before upgrading. There was a circular dependancy that
dselect could not sort out and the system would fly in ever tightening
circles until it disappeared up its own arse. Perl was the thing that
triggered the dependancy problem, I think. It was (man, that was a long
time ago) something like the libc package had a dependancy on the wrong
version of perl (was something like depends on 5.004 rather than >5) and
the perl package depended on glibc. You could not install glibc and you
could not install perl. The fix was to do a manual install of glibc with a
--force depends then let dselect finish the upgrade.

> > Anyway, the fact that apt-get works at all is amazing to me, so I
> > don't mind the occasional bug.

I agree.