Re: Firmware GR result - what happens next?

[Thomas Goirand <zigo@debian.org>]

Hi Steve,

On 10/2/22 21:26, Steve Langasek wrote:
> I heartily endorse ubuntu-release-upgrader, it has been useful in addressing
> uncounted upgrade issues over the years and I think something like this
> would be a nice addition to Debian as well.  Two caveats:
>
>   - Despite this being the sanctioned upgrade path in Ubuntu for over a
>     decade, every single cycle we get bug reports from users who have run
>     into issues because they have bypassed it and done the manual sed
>     /etc/apt/sources.list && apt dist-upgrade.  So in Debian where this has
>     been the norm for /two/ decades, I would not expect this to substantially
>     reduce the error rate in the first release where such a mechanism is
>     introduced.  (After all, whether telling users to use a new upgrader tool
>     or telling them to manually add a component to sources.list, they will
>     have to read the release notes to know about it!)
>
>   - There are always some users that end up with buggy systems after upgrade
>     despite using the supported interface because they upgrade to the devel
>     release, and the release-upgrader is still under development up until
>     release so they miss out on quirks being applied - and there is no
>     interface for users to replay the quirks that they missed out on.  Don't
>     repeat the same design mistake.

I very much dislike the Ubuntu approach, but not only because of the 
above. Also because this approach forgets the fact that we also maintain 
2 rolling-updates distro (testing and unstable).

> In the absence of a release-upgrader, the only way I see to automate this on
> upgrade would be to handle it in the maintainer scripts of either base-files
> (which I don't think the base-files maintainer would like) or apt.

If the base-files maintainer (ie: Santiago Vila) doesn't like doing 
things like this in "his" package, maybe we could have base-file >> 12.2 
depend on another package (called non-free-upgrade?) that would do the 
work instead. We could even have only base-file to depend on that 
package for a single release (ie: only for the lifetime of bookworm, and 
we get rid of the package after the release).

I think that's an even better approach than having this done in 
base-files itself.

Your thoughts?

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)