And this is Ubuntu release testing not good, written , and concerning Musings, Linux
Apparently, the latest set of Ubuntu updates may break it. That's really not good. Microsoft would get flayed alive if a service pack broke Windows in this way. Dapper is a supported release; we need to do better than this. I've got no idea whether it's a problem for everyone or just for a few people, and I don't know how it's being resolved, but I suspect some internal update-release procedures (as well as "how do we undo an update release" procedures) are being looked at.
Meanwhile, don't click the upgrade button just yet.
Comments
Tony Whitmore
Moitio
You don't know how grateful I am for you pointing this out. Thanks, I didn't fancy trawling through the command line trying to fix someone else's mistake... Thank fuck for that :)
sil
Tony: as serious as "the GUI doesn't work"?
Senji
sil: I know two people who've been bitten by it already...
Unfortunately there's no easy way of undoing an update, because most mirrors synch only once a day (you should easily be able to do it if you're willing to wait that long for it to get to the subsidiary mirrors), and some of them won't be under the control of ubuntu people who can resynch them.
Tony Whitmore
Aq: Yeah, XP SP2 caused endless BSODs, running in 640x480, major application breakage or endless reboots for some people. Fairly serious errors, but admittedly they didn't affect /all/ users. Lots of people had to hose their disks and reinstall though.
Paul Nolan
Good thing I'm running edgy ;) (Where this sort of thing is supposed to happen)
Colin Watson
Following up on Tony's comment, this one didn't affect all users either, to the best of my knowledge ...
Anyway, it's easy for us to roll back an update; you just upload a new version backing out the offending patches, which Rodrigo did yesterday. I suspect we'll stage non-obviously-correct updates such as this one via dapper-proposed in future, though.
sil
Colin: that was what I meant about "looking at the release procedures"; a move to dapper-proposed for not-obviously-correct stuff sounds like a good thing here.
I've been watching the update manager with trepidation for the last day and it hasn't even shown the X update, which worries me a bit. I'll have a look at that.
Mike Hearn
It's not really a fair comparison. XP SP2 was routinely installing over systems completely wasted by spyware and viruses, there's no way you can make that robust. Canonical have no such excuse ...
blog.centripetal.ca » Blog Archive » Newest Ubuntu Update Breaks Xorg
[...] Stuart Langridge (he of the excellent LugRadio) posts that the latest Ubuntu update breaks the Xserver install (more info in this forum post). That is, you click the little “there’s an update available” icon, let the installer do its thing, and your GUI doesn’t come back. That is stunningly appalling. [...]
Microsoft Service Packs /do/ break Windows in serious ways. And they don't get as much grief as they should for it.
But I agree with the general point you make.