Isolationism

A recent article on Digg.com suggests that a number of Ubuntu users are experiencing difficulties upgrading from Dapper Drake to the recently released Edgy Eft.

I took the plunge myself yesterday, and spent a hair-pulling day coaxing Ubuntu to install all the packages by apt-get, then by the GUI upgrade tool (several times), then by apt-get again. Eventually, after a number of tries (including one user-aborted attempt because of ridiculously slow downloads and several installation failure aborts), apt-get didn’t want to install anything else and I rebooted and—gratifyingly—everything came up fine, and all the upgrades appear to be present.

Other users haven’t been so lucky; the Ubuntu installation and upgrade support forums are teeming with complaints from both novice and experienced users with varying experiences, some considerably worse than my own.

Disclosure: I am decidedly a novice user of Ubuntu—chiefly because I have no urge nor incentive to learn Debian’s apt-get package management tool when I can point-and-click my way through synaptic; the rest is pretty much the same as any other Linux system, where I feel sufficiently comfortable to orient myself.

My struggle with the upgrade process wasn’t simply things not working properly—some of the design decisions regarding the process itself are pretty awful, too. For example, when a package being installed found a conflict between its configuration file and what is currently on the disk, it:

• Halts the installation process (until the user respond)
• Displays a dialog explaining for which file the conflict exists
• Presents a plain-text diff output (which, frankly, even after years of Linux use I can still barely read to save my life)
• Allows you press one button to keep the current file, or another to replace the old with the new

Once you make a selection, the conflict is resolved one way or another and the installer resumes; Not exactly convenient if you, say, wanted to review the file differences in a way that humans can understand, or maybe would like to to combine the output of the old file with the new.

This rather poorly thought-out upgrade process is even more teeth-grindingly frustrating if you wanted to do something else besides sit in front of your computer waiting for decision prompts for the > 8 hours it takes to install (and that’s only after I downloaded the alternate install CD, because it would have taken days at the speed the downloads were coming in). Why I still needed to download anything at all after already having downloaded the alternate installation CD—which is supposed to contain all the packages needed to upgrade—is completely beyond me, considering it’s not as if I had waited a few months since Edgy’s release before upgrading.

This kind of thing is really inexcusable; have a look at how Gentoo’s portage package installation and update tool handles configuration file conflicts—then go back to the drawing board, fellas.

By way of comparison (and unsubtle segué), my Ubuntu upgrade experience was worse than any Gentoo upgrade experience I’ve suffered through to date; Gentoo may take more time and more commands, but it’s thoroughly documented (peerlessly so, in my opinion) and—frankly—your system never gets as “out of date” as to require such a major upgrade because of the way its package manager (portage) operates. Even the most calamitous problem with glibc on Gentoo only prevented me from installing new packages and never once compromised my ability to continue completely normal use of the system with that one exception (until the problem was resolved by adjusting some USE flags).

I am disappointed but not disenchanted with my Ubuntu upgrade experience; it goes without saying that this kind of business can’t happen if Canonical hopes to woo Windows users to their product. I hope the good folks at Canonical learn from their mistakes and resolve to do better next time; I hope other Ubuntu users out there provide constructive feedback and resolve to be patient for a little while longer to see if things sort themselves out before abandoning Ubuntu altogether.