blog/data/2010-06-08-upgrade-kde.txt

   1 Title: Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze
   2 Tags: english, debian, debian edu, bootsystem
   3 Date: 2010-06-11 22:50
   4
   5 <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
   6 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
   7 have been discovered and reported in the process
   8 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
   9 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
  10 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
  11 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
  12 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
  13
  14 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
  15 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
  16 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
  17 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
  18 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
  19 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
  20
  21 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
  22 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
  23 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
  24 is created.  The bug report
  25 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
  26 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
  27 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
  28 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
  29 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
  30 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
  31 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
  32 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
  33 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
  34 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
  35 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
  36 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
  37 Debian Squeeze.</p>
  38
  39 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
  40 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
  41 trick:</p>
  42
  43 <blockquote><pre>
  44 #!/bin/sh
  45 set -ex
  46
  47 if [ "$1" ] ; then
  48     desktop=$1
  49 else
  50     desktop=gnome
  51 fi
  52
  53 from=lenny
  54 to=squeeze
  55
  56 exec &lt; /dev/null
  57 unset LANG
  58 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
  59 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
  60 fuser -mv .
  61 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
  62 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
  63 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
  64 #!/bin/sh
  65 exit 101
  66 EOF
  67 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
  68 exit_cleanup() {
  69     umount $tmpdir/proc
  70 }
  71 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
  72 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
  73 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
  74
  75 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
  76
  77 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
  78 # to return the correct answers.
  79 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
  80     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
  81
  82 # Include the desktop and laptop task
  83 for test in desktop laptop ; do
  84     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
  85 #!/bin/sh
  86 exit 2
  87 EOF
  88     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
  89 done
  90
  91 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
  92 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
  93 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
  94 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
  95
  96 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
  97 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
  98 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
  99 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
 100 fuser -mv
 101 </pre></blockquote>
 102
 103 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
 104 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
 105 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
 106 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
 107 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
 108 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
 109
 110 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
 111 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
 112 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
 113 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
 114 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
 115 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
 116 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
 117
 118 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
 119 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
 120 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
 121 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
 122 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
 123 packages.</p>