Re: [SLUG] Debian Potato -> Sid upgrade.

[Martin <writeme@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 7 Feb 2001 Steven@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> Afternoon all
>
> I am fiddling with my second Debian install.
>
> I thought I would try unstable on my portable.  Following various
> instructions found by searching Debian.org & Google I did the following:
>
> 1. install stable from cd (base only)
> 2. change sources.list to point at unstable sources at mirror.aarnet etc
> 3. run apt-get update
> 4. run apt-get -d dist-upgrade
> 5. run apt-get -u -f --simulate dist-upgrade (All looked OK at this point)
> 6. run apt-get -u -f dist-upgrade
>
> Apt reports "problems" with a number of packages at the end of this process
> including ifupdown, netkit-inetd, netbase, exim, mailx, setserial, adduser,
> & ppp.
> Lots of things seem to be broken & I can't see why.  Many of the rc.2
> scripts seem to be missing.  I can't get eth0 to go.  Modules weren't being
> loaded but do if I execute the script in init.d manually.  Exim complians
> it has no configuration file (although there does seem to be one) etc, etc.
>
> Could someone suggest whay I have done wrong or what I should try.  I
> thought Debian would handle the upgrade a little more elegantly.

Well, it's called unstable for a reason, and often there can be problems
that impact during the upgrade. At the moment, a lot of people are
finding that perl is getting removed/ignored during the upgrade, and
some have fixed that by just doing:

apt-get install perl-5.6-base perl-5.6

also, I often find that there are conflicts relating to files that are
supposed to be there from the previous version but are not, careful use
of:

dpkg -i --force-overwrite <name>-<version>.deb

is your friend here. Beyond that, report specific errors and maybe
you'll get more help.

cheers,

Martin