Seamless Software Upgrade v4.2008.36-5 is out! - Page 18 - maemo.org

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	Jaffa	2008-09-29 , 22:04
	Posts: 2,535 \| Thanked: 6,681 times \| Joined on Mar 2008 @ UK	#171

Originally Posted by maacruz

I run linux since the mid 90's (first slackware and then suse) and never ever had issues like this.
How on earth can a package install/uninstall fail because a post install script doesn't find some file or can't perform an action like to kill an already non-running daemon? Or because a rc.d link is or isn't active? Or, still much worse, because some user owned file is or isn't somewhere?
That's plainly incredible

If you can clearly identify such problems - ideally including why your tablet got into the state it did - then Bugzilla is the place to log them.

I don't doubt you - and many others - are having issues; but something is different on all your tablets. Software doesn't randomly fail.

Identifying the cause (or even the underlying symptoms of the problem) in Bugzilla will help both you, and others, in future.

A 20-page thread of wailing, gnashing of teeth and cries of "G4h, N0ki4 ate my baybeeees" isn't going to help anyone much. At best, it discourages others who've made potentially dangerous modifications from installing the update. At worst, it leaves an impression of poor quality on this release. Given it works for the silent majority, that would be unfortunate.

Now, there are some specific things we can identify with this release which are (to be charitable) poor QA. Others which are anti-social:

Reinstalls all the PDF manuals. (In /home/user/MyDocs, so it doesn't even take into account MYDOCSDIR)
Re-enables the Tableteer and Quick Contact applets, even if they were disabled.
For some reason, has a Maemo version of v4.1.1 which is... unexpected. #3747
Extras repo is disabled (seems to be inconsistent). #3566

There are probably others, but specificity is key.

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Last edited by Jaffa; 2008-09-29 at 22:09. Reason: Adding Extras disablement

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	Texrat	2008-09-29 , 22:07
	Posts: 11,700 \| Thanked: 10,045 times \| Joined on Jun 2006 @ North Texas, USA	#172

Originally Posted by Jaffa

The recurrence interval in alarmd for hildon-update-notifier is 1440 minutes (24 hours), but it doesn't appear to me (or from the behaviour I've seen) that this 24 hours needs to be spent contiguously online.

My apologies-- that's how it had been communicated to me when we first began testing SSU. I see now that the explanation is overly simplistic.

And to the power users complaining about SSU failures-- have you not noticed that tablets configured within safe parameters are updating fine? That includes mine (in testing I have experienced several more SSU updates than the general public has seen). Every SSU update I've run has worked flawlessly, with the exception that early on one backup did not properly process (and we had been informed upfront that such would be the case).

As to claims of using linux for years without experiencing update problems, sorry, I'm skeptical. I'm on a linux distribution group and see problems with every single update (Redhat).

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	Benson	2008-09-29 , 22:09
	Posts: 4,930 \| Thanked: 2,272 times \| Joined on Oct 2007	#173

Originally Posted by maacruz

I run linux since the mid 90's (first slackware and then suse) and never ever had issues like this.
How on earth can a package install/uninstall fail because a post install script doesn't find some file or can't perform an action like to kill an already non-running daemon? Or because a rc.d link is or isn't active? Or, still much worse, because some user owned file is or isn't somewhere?

Because the core package management system is designed to be conservative and not break things.

Unfortunately, there's a convergence of changes that leaves it prone to stalling painfully.

High-level packaging of the whole update into one; prevents an update from largely succeeding (e.g., except for the documentation), and leaving some packages cleanly left at the old version.
High-level UI that limits the ability of the administrator to respond to apparent conflicts.
Restriction to a filesystem tree in the user's home directory forces things not properly user-local into that tree.

You'll note these are mainly to make things user-friendly when they work, which, as usual, translates into user-atagonistic when something fails. When you permit unlimited third-party software, it's impossible (OK, even more impossible than normal) to avoid something occasionally failing; it's to be hoped that Nokia will reduce these issues so it can fail more gracefully, but I think the situation is somewhat understandable for the first few iterations.

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	danramos	2008-09-29 , 22:10
	Posts: 4,672 \| Thanked: 5,455 times \| Joined on Jul 2008 @ Springfield, MA, USA	#174

Originally Posted by GeneralAntilles

It's an issue in the way current updates are implemented with the packaging system. See bug #3602 for some background.

Ugh.. I hadn't seen that one before. Thanks! I'll have to start following it now.

Originally Posted by GeneralAntilles

Alternatively, just install Rhapsody then uninstall it.

Or, alternatively, Nokia could simply make a .deb available that gives users options for removing these things (at LEAST their menu icons). Say, as Benson suggested, a kind of Tweak tool... so that you never have to have Rhapsody's poisonous crap loaded onto your tablet at all. :P heh

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lm2	2008-09-29 , 22:22
Posts: 609 \| Thanked: 232 times \| Joined on Dec 2007 @ the end of my rope	#175

Originally Posted by Matyas

I can confirm that the new version of initfs_flasher works as advertised. This means that the SD Boot problem can be considered solved.

Good night and good luck!

It's not solved. This problem (see "EDIT") still persists.

	GeneralAntilles	2008-09-29 , 22:23
	Posts: 5,478 \| Thanked: 5,222 times \| Joined on Jan 2006 @ St. Petersburg, FL	#176

Originally Posted by Texrat

And to the power users complaining about SSU failures-- have you not noticed that tablets configured within safe parameters are updating fine?

Heck, it seems to work fine on highly modified tablets (like mine), too.

	Texrat	2008-09-29 , 22:38
	Posts: 11,700 \| Thanked: 10,045 times \| Joined on Jun 2006 @ North Texas, USA	#177

Originally Posted by GeneralAntilles

Heck, it seems to work fine on highly modified tablets (like mine), too.

Yeah. The point is that SSU will work fine for the typical consumer, which is where this sort of thing is targetted.

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	thepenguinonthetelly	2008-09-29 , 22:59
	Posts: 31 \| Thanked: 3 times \| Joined on Jan 2008 @ Indianapolis, IN	#178

I apologize if this has been touched on -- I ran a search and came up with nothing related to the new update.

Tried to install the update, but it's telling me that it can't because libcurl3 is missing. I went looking for it in red pill mode, but don't see it. Help please?

maacruz	2008-09-29 , 23:04
Posts: 1,101 \| Thanked: 1,185 times \| Joined on Aug 2008 @ Spain	#179

Originally Posted by Jaffa

If you can clearly identify such problems - ideally including why your tablet got into the state it did - then Bugzilla is the place to log them.

I don't doubt you - and many others - are having issues; but something is different on all your tablets. Software doesn't randomly fail.

Identifying the cause (or even the underlying symptoms of the problem) in Bugzilla will help both you, and others, in future.

Oh yes, and I do report bugs. Routinely.
And this one will make a really big one

And, as I already hinted, there is a big problem with dpkg and uninstall scripts. The install/uninstall success depends on the script being able to shut down a daemon, which may already be shut down by the user, or a link in rc2.d, which depends again in the user wanting to run or not a service.
That's not robust.

A 20-page thread of wailing, gnashing of teeth and cries of "G4h, N0ki4 ate my baybeeees" isn't going to help anyone much. At best, it discourages others who've made potentially dangerous modifications from installing the update. At worst, it leaves an impression of poor quality on this release. Given it works for the silent majority, that would be unfortunate.

I think there are some QA issues, unfortunately.
It is not that the individual patches are bad quality, on contrary, they are incremental and very good in general. The problem is the huge ms-style update package. By being such, is much more difficult to deal with the single issues, and stacks one failure over another, and so the end result is a bricked tablet. If this updated would have been divided in 5 or more updates, lets say for example, kernel+initfs, browser, desktop, apt, ..., if an update fails it won't bring down the entire system, at least so easily.
For example, having removed the manual doc files in the user home directory to mmc, and replaced the doc directory with a symlink to the actual directory in mmc, will make the whole update fail in the middle; since apt has also been updated and still hasn't been configured, all tableteer repos are lost, and so apt-get won't be able to find the files it needs to finish the installation, and so the system can't finish it configuration. Device bricked upon reboot.

Now, there are some specific things we can identify with this release which are (to be charitable) poor QA. Others which are anti-social:

Reinstalls all the PDF manuals. (In /home/user/MyDocs, so it doesn't even take into account MYDOCSDIR)

Re-enables the Tableteer and Quick Contact applets, even if they were disabled.

For some reason, has a Maemo version of v4.1.1 which is... unexpected. #3747

Extras repo is disabled (seems to be inconsistent). #3566

There are probably others, but specificity is key.

Agreed.

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gammer	2008-09-29 , 23:17
Posts: 204 \| Thanked: 15 times \| Joined on Jan 2007 @ Berlin, Germany	#180

Originally Posted by Texrat

I wouldn't use the word "amazingly" either, although I did say "snappier".
...
The difference appears to be in the way images are cached-- microb is loading the bulk of the page now and then loading images, which is more useful for me.
...

I have the very same impression.