unstable is just that
“unstable is just that” is what some dork says to me on #debian when I said:
i’ve nuked my machine from a dist-upgrade from unstable last night. It won’t boot. The shell doesn’t look right. help. :)
To make matters worse. Last night I did some house cleaning and ripped out all my old kernels to save space. My 6.5G root partition (everything except home) was full!
- Ok, try dpkg or apt news on #debian. Nothing.
- How about blog postings on Debian Planet? Bah…
- I quickly page in mutt and see if debian-devel has talked about it. Hmmm, seemingly no.
- Perhaps debian-user via the lurker interface. Hmmm no.
- Ok, people in #debian-devel will hate me, but I’ll ask there.
- They point to the topic: FUCKED: yaird/kernels (#343042/#343048) Aha!
Ok, I need a rescue CD. Which one I wonder? Let’s try this one grml.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have some sort of Web page like status.debian.org/unstable telling about current high priority problems that will probably affect most Debian users? Right now, I have to look all over the place. Very tiring.
December 14th, 2005 at 2:27 pm
Regarding the idea of status.debian.org/unstable I would love it. So many times while running unstable over the last few years I have wished for such fuctionality. I can only hope it comes about.
December 14th, 2005 at 7:00 pm
How about creating a page in wiki.debian.org?
December 14th, 2005 at 7:43 pm
I thinks it would be a good idea. Some kind of news about unstable, biggest bugs and info about the transitions (like the C++ one).
December 14th, 2005 at 9:01 pm
Hi Kai,
a while a go, I had an idea and asked folks on debian-user about it[0]. Most folks seem to think it was a good idea. So, any status for sid is welcomed. most DD’s involved with transitions have a time frame for: what is going to be changed, what will break, etc. So I thought they could send a ‘heads up’ to the folks who will be upgrading and help them avoid breakage! A simple email to debian-user would make us users feel like the ‘folks on high’ are keeping an eye out for us!
Cheers which ever continent you are in,
Kevin
[0]http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2005/08//msg03504.html
December 14th, 2005 at 9:56 pm
YES! Such a service would be very useful. I think a debian.net page perhaps. A simple blog, or comments, or aggregation, or whatever, but ONE place where helpful people can report a serious unstable bug, timeframes, workarounds, etc. would be great.
December 14th, 2005 at 11:52 pm
I agree, that’s the exact reason I switched my desktop to Ubuntu. I still miss running sid, but finding the time when I feel up to updating and praying nothing breaks too badly became too much of a chore. I know it’s unstable, I just hate when I’m hit with a “known” issue which I would have “known” about too if I’d searched 500 different places first… The wiki would be an ideal place for this info, imho.
December 15th, 2005 at 1:05 am
I have created a page on the wiki http://wiki.debian.org/StatusOfUnstable for this purpose. Hopefully it will help others.
raju
December 15th, 2005 at 2:28 pm
I had a similar thing said to me when I first moved to unstable;
Me: “Help, everything is broken”
l33t-debian-user: “Heh. Welcome to Unstable”
NOT helpful.
I hope your problem is now sorted :)
December 15th, 2005 at 4:46 pm
hmm.. why in the world you think that unstable should be stable? unstable is unstable and it’s broken always =)
Even debian stable is broken… Debian is broken always! Why? Because no one really does any packet testing and stuff, just everyone throws own packet and that’s it.
Redhat is way more nicer stable distribution. Everything is tested and packets just work. And if some packet is upgraded, it won’t brake anything. I think dpkg still has issues with overwriten config files automaticly. sad sad, bad bad system is the debian.
One debian user once said, that you can’t use debian stable, it’s way too old and buggy and that you should use unstable. but unstable is unstable by it’s nature.. so debian is sucky sucky and I don’t recommend anyone using debian anything else except for fun homepages which you can then fix every day…
– Joose
December 15th, 2005 at 10:48 pm
apt-get install apt-listbugs
December 16th, 2005 at 8:45 am
I post a thread on debian-devel:
http://people.debian.org/~terpstra/message/20051214.223106.b9556499.en.html
An interesting suggestion is to make use of the existing topic of #debian-devel.
December 20th, 2005 at 3:42 pm
[...] My unstable system is completely b0rked. :( [...]