A Fool’s Wisdom

With the immediate arrangements for me “volunteering” for my employer, Flock, I booted up a “400$ special” PC, built myself 10 months ago. I have not used this PC much since starting with Merc, as they have met well all my “computing needs” At Merc I had 4 PCs (2 of them top of the line) and a not particular mobile, but true development box, Acer Laptop. This PC of mine was still running the previous version (warty) of the OS, Ubuntu, so I proceeded to update it with confidence as I would with any Debian-based distro.

The Ubuntu 5.04 (hoary) release notes describe the process well. My spidey sense was tingling when after dist-upgrade, some packages were identified as being held back, and I manually “pushed them forward”.

Of course, this did not relieve my spidey sense. The system continued to work fine. Reboot, and still working fine. I started looking at packages versions to see if I could find anything else not upgraded. I found Firefox was not at the most recent version.


% dpkg -l mozilla-firefox
mozilla-firefo 1.0.2-0ubuntu5
% apt-cache showpkg mozilla-firefox
Versions:
1.0.6-0ubuntu0.1
1.0.2-0ubuntu5


Something was very wrong!

Then I remembered that I enabled pinning through /etc/apt/prefences many monthts before, because the initial release of Ubuntu was lacking some recent packages that I used on other distributions. In the end, because of the fantastic rate of change of OSS today, the dependency trees are too deep for me to use pinning.

I have now removed pinning. In a couple of hours, after the packages are all downloaded, I will see my success. Hoar(a)y!

The lessons:

as neither apt-get nor Synaptic generally warned me of this problem (after I cleared a few cases).