Isak Savo (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} isak) wrote,@ 2007-03-31 12:07:00 |
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| Current mood: |  annoyed |
| Current music: | Manowar - Blood Brothers |
Morning Upgrade Breakage
For a pretty long time I've been mildly annoyed at the constant "New updates available" notification bubble that pops more or less every day (Ubuntu Edgy Eft). Yes, it's good that the vendor is actively trying to make my desktop as secure as possible, by quickly providing fixes for recent vulnerabilities, and it gives me as a user confidence that Ubuntu is taking security seriously. The problem is when they do it too often, the effect can be the completely opposite:
If I every day gets informed that my system is not secure, and that I need to upgrade X packages, I start loosing faith in the system. Why should I update today? It will be unsecure tomorrow anyway. Not to mention the fact that the constant nagging is annoying as hell.
It wouldn't be such a problem if I knew that all updates that showed up in that notification was really urgent, but that's not the case. Sometimes, the update is just an internal packaging change (moving file a from location b to c or perhaps a minor translation fix for a language I don't even speak. There must be some categorization here.
The reason I make this negative blog post is because today, when I as usual installed the new set of absolutly critical security updates (30 or so, including openoffice and firefox), stuff broke badly. First indication was that the firefox icon in my panel was gone. WTF, check the menu, no icon there either. Try clicking on the panel launcher... nothing... Tried the menu entry... nothing... Tried the terminal:
isak@skywalker: ~ $ firefox
bash: firefox: command not found
Huh?
isak@skywalker: ~ $ dpkg --listfiles firefox | grep bin/ | wc -l
0
It sure seems like the binary is missing from the newly upgraded firefox package. Damn it, I need to get online to search for an answer. Clever as I am (Hey, I'm a "power user", right) I install epiphany in hope that it will work where firefox fails. Of course it doesn't, since libgtkmozembed.so is missing. Damn it!
Final try, apt-get install links just to get online and do a search on google for "wildgardenseed firefox". I'm not "feeling lucky" so I pick the second hit labeled "List of Autopackages (by TM)". Taj: I owe you a pint of beer (or beverage of choise) if we ever meet in real life. Your package of firefox saved my day!
Epilogue
I did ask in
#ubuntu if anyone else was affected or if it was a local issue. One guy had the same version of firefox as me and it worked for him, and he suggested that I should try to re-install the package (sudo aptitude reinstall firefox). That did fix the problem so I'm starting to believe this issue is more a package manager bug than a QA error, The outcome for me was just as bad and I started to get flashback from that xorg update that broke ubuntu about a year ago. I wonder what would've happened if I wasn't an experienced linux/ubuntu user...(Note: I did not have firefox running or anything when I did the upgrade. The computer was just booted and nothing except the desktop was running)
