Upgrading a tainted system (with packages from outside the ubuntu repositories) can seriously cripple your system right now. It is recommended to uninstall the foreign programs before upgrading, but how many people know that? Here’s my idea for making upgrade never fail, and upgrade predictably.
- check the installed packages against the ubuntu repositories
- present the user with a list of apps / libs that couldn’t be found in the repos and propose to remove them beforehand (and try to install them back after the upgrade)
- remove the programs, and keep the list for after the upgrade (leave the configuration files on disk)
- upgrade the system
- try to install all programs on the list back from the new repositories (typically the new repositories have more programs and newer versions, so chances are some programs can be installed from the ubuntu repositories this time)
- in the end, present the list of programs that couldn’t be installed back to the user, so they know what happened (they have installed them from a different repo before, so they can do it again)
There’s probably much more to an upgrade than I make it seem, but I think this could make the upgrade problem free and more transparent to the user.
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wlamia wrote on the 21 Mar 08 at 21:47
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Seamless upgrading is, in my opinion, THE major shortfall of all Linux distros. Because new releases happen more frequently than M$ os'es, it is imperative that upgrading be easy, straightforward, error-free, and require a minimum of user intervention.
Specifically, upgrades should attempt to preserve any non-standard repositories that have been added, detect any incompatible applications, detect any apps that have been installed from tarballs or purchased media, and preserve *all* configuration options, including screen parameters, touchpad settings, networking configs, etc.
Expecting users to remember all the tweaks that have been applied over the course of not-very-many months of use is absurd, and will backfire big time.
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