If it ain't broke, don't fix it?

[elfs]

I have a dilemma about my laptop. Gentoo has announced that its standard windowing server, X, will now be X server 1.5. I'm running version 1.3. As time goes by, products and services that depend upon X will start to use faculties of the later server and I'll be unable to install them on my box. I'm already having some problems with some games.

But my laptop has an ATI video card. The driver I'm using, 8.476, has been amazingly stable for months now. Every time I've upgraded, it's always been the ATI driver's conflict with the hibernate/suspend driver that's made this thing crash. Now, they SAY that driver 8.522 is "stable" as well, but I don't trust it and upgrading to it would be a bear, because if it doesn't work backing out will be one huge goddamned pain in the neck.

Comments

[solarbird]

Can you make a CD-ROM boot image and test the new driver that way?

[tehrasha.livejournal.com]

That was my first thought as well. Or a 2nd hard drive to use as a sacrificial lamb?

why can't you upgrade then later downgrade...?

[sandhawke.livejournal.com]

I share your pain. I haven't found a good answer.

For my last OS upgrade (Ubuntu 8.10) I was feeling some weird blend of caution and adventurousness, so instead of upgrading, I swapped hard drives and installed fresh. It was nice to see how the system acted out of the box, but it took me weeks to get the configuration really comfortable again, and suspend is still broken randomly. In retrospect, I probably should have made a hard-drive image backup, then upgraded. But I still like the concept of a fresh install...

Anyway, I guess what we really want is package management that's so good you could easily try it out for a few days then change back, later, with the click of a button (or command line, or whatever.) And really easy (mostly automatic) public bug reporting in the process. (Reason for downgrading? [x] it seemed to make my system unstable.)

You can imagine having a control for each package where you just say which version you want, and can adjust it arbitrarily (among available versions). One of the complications would be that formats for configuration information changes between versions, so you'd need loss-less conversion programs in both directions. (This is more manageable if an extensible format like XML or RDF is used, but of course you can't assume it will be.) I don't really know -- how much can you do that with existing package managers...?

An even harder problem might be the combinatorics in the interactions (cf integration testing). Even if all the interations of packages were perfectly well known and documented, changing your versions around would be like solving a 15-puzzle: you upgrade the X server, then you can upgrade package Y, then you can upgrade package Z. Having done that, you see that package W became unstable, so you have to downgrade it two versions to make it stable again. Now if you want to downgrade X again, you have to roll-back each of those other changes.

I dunno, maybe that is manageable....

(I'm also reminded of some projects for zero-install systems, but I don't even remember what they were called.)

[sianmink.livejournal.com]

Don't get me started on ATI's Linux drivers and suspend/hibernate issues.

[(Anonymous)]

Why not install the new server in /opt, and test it there. If it works, recompile it to the standard place.

Why upgrade now?

[kendaer.livejournal.com]

If it'll be the pain you know it will, why not wait until you have some unable-to-live-without app that needs X 1.5 before you bother upgrading?

personally, I tend to be the sort that lives on the slightly more bleeding edge, so I tend to do the backup-image of the server, upgrade and revert wholesale to the backup if it is fubar'd.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

Nuke-and-pave the swap partition temporarilly, install an EmptyTree re-build there? I've done that at least once under Gentoo to test out a change I wasn't too sure about, let it chug overnight and test in the morning. But I have a 16GB swap partition since I play with VM's a lot so it may not be a choice available to you without even more pain of shuffling partition sizes.

[codeamazon.livejournal.com]

If you KNOW maintenance will be needed later, and you have the time to perform it now, now is a good time to do it.

This from the gal looking out the window at a sunny day and wishing she'd had time to pull her bike out of winter storage and get it ready for riding season. *sigh* Back to flooring.