[gNewSense-users] Re: CAUTION please read my warning at the top of the mail WAS: Re: Upgrading deltad -> deltah

[Yavor Doganov]

Paul O'Malley wrote:
> 
> This may break your system if you don't understand all of the steps 
> involved, and the inherent risks.

Yes, I agree that it is probably not for everyone.  The biggest risk
is power outage, in which case it is very likely that the system would
be broken and hard to recover.

> As a set of instructions it scares me.

As long as every package is upgraded successfully and all dependencies
are satisfied, the system is consistent.  It is hard to get it wrong,
since the packaging system doesn't allow you to do it wrong (well, at
least not easily).  

But what I did should not happen normally, one would know what
packages to install first (instead of simply guessing), what the next
upgrade run/step should be, etc. instead of the undoubtedly harder
and more time-consuming steps I went trhough.  This information is
missing from the Release Notes for Hardy, and is encrypted in
update-manager-core in a fairly complicated form (at least for me).
Maybe it is their new and only way to handle upgrades...

Ideally, someone who understands Python should tweak the
do-release-upgrade scripts for gNewSense.  Maybe I should have
inspected carefully what it does and follow the steps, but I concluded
that it would take longer so I did it the hard way.

Like Paul, I don't recommend my way to people who are not comfortable
with aptitude/dpkg, do not understand fully the purrpose of the
maintainer scripts and cannot easily figure out from the error
messages what is going on.

At least make sure that you have Internet access or alternatively can
seek assistance from a friend.