Debian testing dist-upgrade?

[Peter King]

On Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 05:44:21PM -0400, William O'Higgins Witteman wrote:

> This is slightly Debian-specific, but I have just come back from two
> weeks away and I find that an "apt-get dist-upgrade" calls for a huge
> number of changes.  I have never had the slightest trouble before, but
> one of the changes appears to be the adoption of xorg.
> x-window-system-core is being kept back, and I feel unsettled about this
> migration.
> 
> Has anyone else done this?  Have you had trouble?  Is this migration
> (from XFree86 to Xorg) a good thing?  Enquiring minds want to know :-)

It is indeed a Good Thing. But one problem bit me badly over the
weekend, and perhaps you can avoid it. It's not a problem with Xorg
at all -- Xorg is a treat -- but it showed up along the way.

As described, I did the mega-update in testing. The problem is that
aptitude (or apt-get) wanted to upgrade *both* fontconfig and a font
called ttf-opensymbol. Well, it got fontconfig ready, but, as usual,
hadn't configured it, when it moved on to ttf-opensymbol, and tried to
install it. Disaster! Because ttf-opensymbol couldn't be installed,
since it depends in both preinst and postrm scripts on running
fontconfig (actually fc-cache), which it couldn't do because, well,
it hadn't been installed. So ttf-opensymbol is left half-installed.
On to fontconfig, which can't be installed either, because it keeps
breaking on ttf-opensymbol. The result is a pair of packages that are
stuck, each half-installed.

The worst of it is, all sorts of things depend on fontconfig. OpenOffice
depends on ttf-opensymbol, so it won't install/load/run, but fontconfig
is far more insidious. Most window managers run fc-cache when launched,
for instance, but since fontconfig is only half-installed it segfaults
and crashes Xorg. That's actually how I discovered the problem, and I
spent hours thinking it was an xorg.conf problem before figuring it out.

My solution, which is half-baked, was to edit the preinst instructions
for the .deb file for ttf-opensymbol. Not a great idea, but it worked.

The problem is listed as a "minor bug" against ttf-opensymbol in the
Debian buglist. It was a lot more than minor, I thought.

On the plus side, Xorg is a very clean program, and it feels to me to be
much snappier than XFree86. I've been running Xorg on OpenBSD (one
computer) and Debian Unstable (two computers) for several months now,
and it's well-behaved and light on its feet. I was waiting impatiently
for Xorg to finally hit testing, and, despite the troubles, I'm glad it
has.

-- 
Peter King			 	peter.king-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org
Department of Philosophy
215 Huron Street
The University of Toronto		    (416)-978-4951 ofc
Toronto, ON  M5S 1A1
       CANADA

http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/

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