fragility

One thing i tought i wouldn’t do for a long time after i installed Ubuntu Breezy Badger last November or so, was a fresh install. After i realized i loved Ubuntu and that i wouldn’t keep it (yay no more distro hopping), i tought reinstalling would be a word to forget for a long time. Well that isn’t the case.

When dapper was almost out, i decided to go “unstable”, and i upgraded to Dapper Drake. This was in last April, right when they decided that Dapper’s release would be postponed by 6 weeks. It behaved fairly well for an unstable branch, but it left it’s marks. Somewhere along the way, something went wrong, very wrong.

One day, i found myself having some files replaced by strange symlinks, and i still found them today. /usr/bin/java was symlinked to some man page ! And like this one, i had many other important files symlinked to something that had nothing to do with it, like /etc/apache/httpd.conf symlinked to some binary file. I found so many already that i can’t remember them all. And there’s probably something else that went wrong, because once in a while i found some weird behaviors here and there.

One problem i had during Dapper unstable was with my Epson CX3200 not printing anything. “This will be solved by dapper’s release”, i tought. No way. There was a bug report about it, i confirmed it…and it only received confirmed status until very recently. I know, there are a lot of bug reports, and developers have limited time and resources, but this one was fairly simple, and the developer looked like he was paying some attention to it when it was first reported.

Well they are working out to get it solved now (i can’t try it because i don’t have the printer with me at the moment, and i’ll only have contact with it in September), and one of the conclusions they have reached is this:

So it appears to me there is a bug in the install script for gs-esp which does not install pstoraster.conv if the package is already configured even when the file is missing therefore only affecting upgraded systems and not newly installed systems.

If this happened, lots of other things might have happened that might have screwed my installation.

Now the big question is: fom what i can tell from the bug report, this happened to systems that were upgraded while dapper was unstable. Do systems that have been upgraded when dapper was already stable suffer from the same problem ?

For the sake of Ubuntu, let’s just hope not.