I ended up here as a result of investigating the Nvidia driver issue and the title of this thread resonated with me. As someone who has been using Debian since slink, on all my workstations and servers, I've certainly experienced a few breakages and accept that, from time to time, unforeseen breakages will occur, such as the filesystem bug in 6.1.66.
The issue with the Nvidia drivers was not unforeseen though, yet it was still decided to push this release out knowing that it would break many systems.
It seemed obvious to me that the purpose of this thread, posed as a question, was not to seek specific answers to the question posed by the thread title but to raise the general issue of known broken point releases.
The real question is should Debian users assume that point releases are broken if they are to avoid interrupting their work - the work they do on their Debian systems - to resolve problems caused by broken point releases, and instead delay updates until they're confident that they won't run into problems, or should Debian delay point releases that are known to break many users systems until the foreseen breakages can be addressed?
I think that most people who use Debian to do their work would prefer point releases to be delayed until known breakages are fixed and, quite frankly, I can't see any good arguments to counter that view.
I don't find the arguments that have been presented here, that appear to support the view that there is no issue or that the issue is invalid, convincing.
The comment that "The majority of Debian (and GNU/Linux in general) installations are on servers, which don't care one iota about wireless (especially with closed-source blobs) or nvidia being nvidia and not keeping up with kernel changes." was actually a bit insulting to the OP - there was nothing "fixed" by that response, which was incorrect in both of its points; wifi is a very valid means of running system monitoring networks in DCs, and GPUs in servers are very much a thing, for a number of different uses.
Furthermore, by referencing "The majority" there is an implication that only a very small number of users have been affected: there have currently been > 20,000 views across the different threads about this 12.5 nvidia issue on this forum.
The suggestion that Debian users should subscribe to mailing lists is not a bad idea but it is rather akin to requiring that everyone who drives an auto-mobile should also be able to maintain and repair it. There is nothing wrong with doing this if that is what a user wishes to do - indeed, back on slink I recall having having to work on custom mode-settings for CRT displays, to avoid damaging them, and that sort of thing was normal, at the time, but shouldn't be expected these days.
I think that all users of Debian - those who have chosen Debian to do their work - are very much aware of how much time and effort it takes to make Debian available, and are very grateful for all of the work done by its contributors and maintainers. I think that no attack was intended by the OP, upon any of the people who give us Debian, and I certainly don't wish to attack Debian either - I think it's brilliant. But, as a user, I still think that there is an issue to be resolved, or at least clarified.
As someone who does quite a bit of coding as well as sysadmin I'm a bit surprised that this problem couldn't have been handled by the package dependency hooks. As I compile custom kernels (from the deb source) for all of my systems, I can't use the nvidia packages in Debian's repos but the nvidia download driver package installs into predictable locations and should be able to be detected by a dependency hook and identified as a conflict. Having said that, I haven't needed to look into Debian package dependency hooks so don't know how trivial it would be - I can only base it on similar stuff I've worked on. In any case, the nvidia issue is likely to be resolved in the next week or so, one way or another, despite the ideological reasons it occurred in the first place.
The issue with the Nvidia drivers was not unforeseen though, yet it was still decided to push this release out knowing that it would break many systems.
It seemed obvious to me that the purpose of this thread, posed as a question, was not to seek specific answers to the question posed by the thread title but to raise the general issue of known broken point releases.
The real question is should Debian users assume that point releases are broken if they are to avoid interrupting their work - the work they do on their Debian systems - to resolve problems caused by broken point releases, and instead delay updates until they're confident that they won't run into problems, or should Debian delay point releases that are known to break many users systems until the foreseen breakages can be addressed?
I think that most people who use Debian to do their work would prefer point releases to be delayed until known breakages are fixed and, quite frankly, I can't see any good arguments to counter that view.
I don't find the arguments that have been presented here, that appear to support the view that there is no issue or that the issue is invalid, convincing.
The comment that "The majority of Debian (and GNU/Linux in general) installations are on servers, which don't care one iota about wireless (especially with closed-source blobs) or nvidia being nvidia and not keeping up with kernel changes." was actually a bit insulting to the OP - there was nothing "fixed" by that response, which was incorrect in both of its points; wifi is a very valid means of running system monitoring networks in DCs, and GPUs in servers are very much a thing, for a number of different uses.
Furthermore, by referencing "The majority" there is an implication that only a very small number of users have been affected: there have currently been > 20,000 views across the different threads about this 12.5 nvidia issue on this forum.
The suggestion that Debian users should subscribe to mailing lists is not a bad idea but it is rather akin to requiring that everyone who drives an auto-mobile should also be able to maintain and repair it. There is nothing wrong with doing this if that is what a user wishes to do - indeed, back on slink I recall having having to work on custom mode-settings for CRT displays, to avoid damaging them, and that sort of thing was normal, at the time, but shouldn't be expected these days.
I think that all users of Debian - those who have chosen Debian to do their work - are very much aware of how much time and effort it takes to make Debian available, and are very grateful for all of the work done by its contributors and maintainers. I think that no attack was intended by the OP, upon any of the people who give us Debian, and I certainly don't wish to attack Debian either - I think it's brilliant. But, as a user, I still think that there is an issue to be resolved, or at least clarified.
As someone who does quite a bit of coding as well as sysadmin I'm a bit surprised that this problem couldn't have been handled by the package dependency hooks. As I compile custom kernels (from the deb source) for all of my systems, I can't use the nvidia packages in Debian's repos but the nvidia download driver package installs into predictable locations and should be able to be detected by a dependency hook and identified as a conflict. Having said that, I haven't needed to look into Debian package dependency hooks so don't know how trivial it would be - I can only base it on similar stuff I've worked on. In any case, the nvidia issue is likely to be resolved in the next week or so, one way or another, despite the ideological reasons it occurred in the first place.
Statistics: Posted by LeeE — 2024-02-14 22:56 — Replies 16 — Views 908