Re: [LAU] What on earth... resolved

From: Will Godfrey <willgodfrey@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Sun Dec 22 2013 - 20:30:48 EET

On Sun, 22 Dec 2013 00:41:07 +0100
Philipp Überbacher <murks@tuxfamily.org> wrote:

> On Sat, 21 Dec 2013 22:23:42 +0000
> Will Godfrey <willgodfrey@musically.me.uk> wrote:
>
> > did the debian devs think they were doing?
> >
> > My music machine is set up precisely as I want it with no spare fluff
> > or eye-candy, and fits my workflow like a glove. I seldom make any
> > changes, but thought it high time I checked for upgraded packages. Up
> > till now this has never been any kind of problem and usually results
> > in some tiny overall improvements.
> >
> > Today was different. Without asking, indeed, without even a warning,
> > they installed GDM, Gnome3 and pulse audio, thus rendering my
> > computer totally useless. The only thing I could do was reboot, then
> > log into recovery mode, find aptitude and delete the crap.
> >
> > I will never really trust debian again :(
>
> apt-get upgrade didn't show what it was planning to do? That sounds
> unlikely, but if it did happen, then something is very wrong in
> debian-land.
>
> Regards,
> Philipp

This turned out to be a minor cascade of issues.

In the first place I should make the point that I've been using debian
exclusively since the days of 'sarge'. My installs all follow the same pattern.
I install just the minimum to get a terminal from which I can then install only
what I want. I set up an autoloading single user (without admin privs), then
pull in just enough of X to be able to run openbox and ROX filer, from then on
I build up the audio system I want with (hopefully) the minimum of extraneous
crud.

I flagged this up here because it was (at that time) fundamentally my music
making machine that was borked. As well as hoping for some suggestions as to
how it happened I wanted to warn fellow musicians of a possible problem.

When I did the upgrade I was somewhat lazy and used synaptic's 'mark all
upgrades', with just a cursory glance to check that nothing dramatic was going
to happen. At some point in time synaptic itself has gained another,
pre-ticked, check box for enabling 'recommends' to be treated as dependencies.
Putting a script in the apt directory to stop this action no longer works.

Because GDM got installed, my basic start script was completely bypassed,
leaving my machine in a totally unfamiliar state. There was no message to say
that this was going to happen, and no reason for me to suspect that it might.

I have another machine with a fairy similar install so used that to track (and
block) exactly the sequence of events. One of the benefits of synaptic over
using apt-get or even aptitude is that you can get it to very clearly display
just the upgradeable packages, so I did this and one-by-one marked them for
upgrade, looking for dependencies. Imagine my astonishment when openbox came up
with an apparent dependency of both gnome-session and KDE-session.
Gnome-session then had a dependency for GDM and Gnome desktop. To make matters
worse, this was Gnome3. Gnome desktop has a dependency on pulse audio (spit).

Openbox has absolutely no need for any of this stuff at all.

It was an very fast responding and helpful guy on the openbox list who informed
me that the debian maintainer had added the Gnome and KDE sessions to the
openbox package as 'recommends'. Combined with synaptic (unknown to me) having
the box checked for treating recommends as dependencies, the result was
inevitable.

I've since been informed that the change to the openbox package falls foul of
the debian policy document, has been raised on a number of distro lists (but
not UCOL) and has now been reverted.

P.S.
@ Robin Gareus
Smug unhelpful side-swipe ... could do better.
@ Ralf Mardorf
Lots of assumptions there ... most of them wrong.

-- 
Will J Godfrey
http://www.musically.me.uk
Say you have a poem and I have a tune.
Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.
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Received on Mon Dec 23 00:15:02 2013

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