[conspire] Fwd: wheezy is OUT. tonight. Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: BAD meeting for 2013-05 (and mini-installfests, and ...)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Tony Godshall (togo at of.net):

> All I meant was that if you are in the habit of apt-get update &&
> apt-get upgrade and you point to stable, and you are not following the
> news of releases closely you can find the earth suddenly shifting
> beneath your feet.

For values of 'earth shifting beneath your feet' approximating a major
semi-automated upgrade, to be sure.  

However, did it _work_?  If it had significant problems and you weren't
six months or more out of date when you started, then you have a big
complaint against the Debian Release Manager and the developers
collectively.  If not, then you're getting what it says on the tin,
i.e., a release-based distribution driven by a semi-automated
maintenance regime.

You might say 'It'd be nice if apt-get were to pop up a message saying
"Hey, user!  This is going to be a long download and upgrade session
because a release has come out.  Continue (y/N)?"'

That might be nice.  However, honestly you get the next best thing if
you suddenly notice that 100 pages are being fetched instead of the
normal three or four, because at that point you cdan Ctrl-C break,
saying 'Oh, I guess there's been a release, and I want to do this when I
have more time.'  

apt-get and dpkg are pretty much idempotent, i.e., you can break and
then later resubmit the same commands and the tools will still do The
Right Thing.