Sunday of my Life

So, for those who keep up with such abstract geek news as the newest version of Debian, you’d know that Debian recently upgraded it’s stable release from Sarge to Etch.

(They went Potato, Woody, Sarge, Etch… all cahracters from Toy Story. The things they count as unstable belong to a version called ‘Sid’. Sid, unstable, get it?)

Anyway, internally, Debian uses the apt package manager. Apt references the current version it’s supposed to be sourcing packages from either using the name of the version (sarge, etc) or its alias (stable, oldstable, testing, unstable, etc). Unfortunately, a lot of systems tend to use these aliases. This is a really bad idea, as some people are only discovering now that stable has stopped being Sarge, and has become Etch. Think about it. There’ve been some fairly major changes between the two versions. They’re simply not closely compatible enough for this to continue working.

That’s why an upgrade I did recently on a server said to me: “Sure! I can upgrade <this long list of packages> for you! First, though, I’ll need to uninstall my kernel.”

This has now resulted in me having to do a complete survey of all the servers I work with to make sure none of the others do it. Oh well, here’s to job security!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 at 2:49 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.