This is in response to a bug on the Debian documenation mailing list,
but I'm replying to Devuan instead because some of it may be relevant
here.

I'm particularly concerned by the sentence at the end:

> But I haven't heard anybody claiming to have
> done any bug-free upgrades, so it's hard to be confident.

I gather he's talking about upgrades from jessie to stretch.

Are his problems caused by systemd issues? Or are we going to
run afoul of them, too? Does Devuan have reports of clean
upgrades to ascii?

-- hendrik

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 10:37:33AM +0100, Justin B Rye wrote:
> [Resend - sorry, I thought mail to #864043 would go to the list]
>
> Niels Thykier wrote:
> >> Meanwhile, my test upgrades so far (multiple trials on two different
> >> machines) have consistently run into a couple of nasty undocumented
> >> glitches - the upgrade disables my network connection (a restart of
> >> networking.service that errors out), and the new version of X doesn't
> >> respond to input devices until I install xserver-xorg-input-libinput.
> >> I was hoping to find some mention of these issues in pending bug
> >> reports, but it doesn't look like it.
> >
> > Have both of these issues been adequately documented by now? They sound
> > like the kind of issues that ought to be documented (assuming they are a
> > general problem).
>
> Sorry, no. This dist-upgrade has been the trickiest I've seen for a
> decade or so, and most of the glitches aren't really documented.
>
> #1) X starts needing xserver-xorg-input-libinput, which will be pulled
> in by default if you've got xserver-xorg-input-all installed, but not
> otherwise (symptoms: input stops working). There's a new item about
> libinput, but it basically fails to address this issue.
>
> #2) independently, startx stops working with similar symptoms, but
> nothing I've found makes it work again, regardless of what else I
> install (in particular, xserver-xorg-legacy makes no difference).
> The only solution I've found is to switch to lightdm (which might as
> well happen before the dist-upgrade). If nobody else is seeing this
> then I don't even know what to report a bug against.
>
> #3) after an upgrade, ifupdown is marked as automatically installed
> and no longer held in by dependencies, so things like aptitude want
> to uninstall it as junk. Fortunately I'd noticed this was likely to
> happen before I started doing upgrades, so I've never had my network
> crippled by this. I suggested some text about this in
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=864166#57
>
> #4) at the end of the dist-upgrade needrestart restarts networking,
> which fails - the wifi interface gives errors as if I'd defined two
> gateway addresses. You can tell needrestart not to do this, but
> fortunately it's fixed by a reboot, and a reboot was the next step
> in the dist-upgrade anyway. However, it's easy to imagine ways this
> could combine with the other items on this list to be a real problem.
> I can't reproduce the issue outside the context of a dist-upgrade, so
> again I don't know where the bug is exactly, and if nobody else is
> seeing it then I don't know if it warrants being mentioned in the
> release-notes.
>

> It's possible that #2 amd #4 only hit me because I'm doing my trial
> upgrades on an old machine, and I'm not using a mainstream desktop
> environment (just fvwm).  But I haven't heard anybody claiming to have
> done any bug-free upgrades, so it's hard to be confident.
> -- 
> JBR    with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
>     sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package

>