[sid] yeah, i broke it...

[wizard10000]

-= crossposted to debian forums =-

One thing about Sid; he keeps me humble.



I haven't broken a Linux installation badly enough to justify a reinstall in about eight years and I was fairly proud of that fact. Well, I got distracted during an update and

• broke Rule Number One and didn't pay attention to what apt was offering to remove The best part about this is that I had been holding for several days because upgrades looked unsafe
• apt-listbugs didn't say anything, probably because it wasn't a bug
• ran apt autoclean afterward, so now the package archives for those 29 packages are no longer local, and
• since it looks like xorg was in the middle of transitioning, the packages that were removed are no longer available.

So, with about half of xorg gone i manage to piece together enough of X that both fluxbox and plasma5 ran but mouse and keyboard refused to cooperate. Couldn't even switch terminals if X was running; I knew the name of the package I needed but it was no longer available in the archives and getting it from https://snapshot.debian.org sounded a bit like dependency hell so I decided to reinstall.

I have a nightly dpkg dump of packages I have installed. Using this to restore installed packages worked not at all because of the twentysomething package names that had changed between the time my cron job made the dump and when I did the upgrade. Nice.

I had to manually parse this 2000-line text file and compare it to synaptic output to make sure I got all my applications reinstalled, which took the better part of a day and a half.

In the end there was only one casualty; a fancy right-click desktop menu I'd grabbed from http://kde-apps.org and that same applet refuses to install with nasty error messages telling the developer to fix his code, so it doesn't appear that's happening but everything else is back to normal

Lesson learned. Again. Focus when upgrading a development distribution

[Snowhog]

Ya think?! And this, for one, is why I NEVER do package management from a GUI; I ALWAYS do it from a konsole so I can see EVERYTHING that apt says it's going to do.

Two rules to live by:

Rule #1: NEVER manage your system if you are not totally alert.

Rule #2: See rule #1!

But every now and then, we all need to be humbled!

[wizard10000]

Ya think?! And this, for one, is why I NEVER do package management from a GUI; I ALWAYS do it from a konsole so I can see EVERYTHING that apt says it's going to do.

Two rules to live by:

Rule #1: NEVER manage your system if you are not totally alert.

Rule #2: See rule #1!

But every now and then, we all need to be humbled!

Yeah, this one stung because I'm pretty religious about backups; my timing was just awful. Traffic from FTP Masters had slowed to a crawl so I figured I was safe.

I don't do upgrades with a GUI either, but I'll do a point and click install in a heartbeat. I just kept my package dump on one side of the screen and did the pointy clicky thing with synaptic on the other. That took awhile.

[GreyGeek]

Everyone who has gotten "comfortable" with Linux has been hit by that experience. Some, like me, even more than once. That's why I keep snapshots/backups of important data regularly. Then, after a problem, I am only 30 minutes away from a new install, and a few hours or a day to restore other apps and data. Always works better than trying to dig out of a hole.

Snowhog, the other reason why I always use a Konsole to do upgrades is because it is a LOT faster, IMO.