+
+
The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
+see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly. A few bugs
+have been discovered and reported in the process
+(#585410 in nagios3-cgi,
+#584879 already fixed in
+enscript and #584861 in
+kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
+am working on a script to automate the test.
+
+
The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
+Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
+it. To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
+script is inserted. To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
+desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
+(only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).
+
+
A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
+currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
+in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
+is created. The bug report
+#566000 make me suspect
+this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
+to make sure the upgrade go well. Testing on virtual and real
+hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
+do the trick in such settings anyway. This is a
+known
+issue and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
+maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
+working with old kernels or something like that. I really wish the
+udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
+upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
+documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
+Debian Squeeze.
+
+
Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades. This test
+script, which I call upgrade-test for now, is doing the
+trick:
+
+
+#!/bin/sh
+set -ex
+
+if [ "$1" ] ; then
+ desktop=$1
+else
+ desktop=gnome
+fi
+
+from=lenny
+to=squeeze
+
+exec < /dev/null
+unset LANG
+mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
+tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
+fuser -mv .
+debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
+chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
+cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d <<EOF
+#!/bin/sh
+exit 101
+EOF
+chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
+exit_cleanup() {
+ umount $tmpdir/proc
+}
+mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
+# Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
+trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
+
+chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
+
+# Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger. It need the test scripts
+# to return the correct answers.
+echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
+ chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
+
+# Include the desktop and laptop task
+for test in desktop laptop ; do
+ echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test <<EOF
+#!/bin/sh
+exit 2
+EOF
+ chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
+done
+
+DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
+DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
+export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
+chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
+
+echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
+chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
+touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
+chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
+fuser -mv
+
+
+
I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
+with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
+differently so far. I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
+regularly and post the result on the web. The Gnome upgrade currently
+work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
+kdebase-workspace-data
+
+
I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
+(KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
+post, so I will refrain from trying. I can report that for Gnome,
+aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
+remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
+KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
+193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded
+
+
I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
+is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
+booting without a hitch. Was unsure if there were still bugs with
+packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
+upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
+packages.
+
+
