Tl;dr: Automatic updates on my home server caused 8 hours of downtime of all of renn.es’ docker services including email and public websites
Tl;dr: Automatic updates on my home server caused 8 hours of downtime of all of renn.es’ docker services including email and public websites
The whole “do as I say” prompt existed to make sure that stuff doesn’t happen automatically. It’s rather unfortunate that people don’t read the warnings and just continue when something is clearly wrong, but with that problem fixed by just plain refusing to do some operations I think updates aren’t that big of a risk.
I wouldn’t run headless automatic updates on a server you’re not willing to spend a day on fixing at the worst moment you can imagine, but automatic updates don’t have to be bad. Debian/Ubuntu’s unattended-upgrades script have never caused me any trouble, especially with their stable release schedule. Maybe they cause a few minutes of performance issues and a few dropped connections, but the automatic security updates are worth the minor inconvenience.
Right, it was clearly LTT’s fault for not reading, but automatic upgrades are the same thing as not reading. I’ve been using Linux for a very long time now, and I’ve seen Apt try to do some very stupid things before. Maybe it’s better nowadays but I don’t know if I’ll ever shake the gut instinct to not allow Apt to do whatever it thinks is right.
I’ve run into apt asking me if I want to remove my entire desktop environment before, but very rarely did it leave things as broken as bad as what triggered the “do as I say” prompt.
Honestly, for Linux to gain any popularity, apt/dnf/pacman commands need to disappear from the Linux basics everyone needs to get through. We have had GUI package managers forever and they need to be more user friendly (and detect when you’re doing very stupid things with clear warnings, like “doing this will probably break your entire install” without expecting the end user to read a wall of cryptic text).
The trick to apt is to make sure nothing gets removed when you install stuff and only a few packages get removed if you uninstall stuff. Aptitude is better at listing the impact of what you’re doing and will suggest alternatives, but it can still use a GUI to make things clear for normal people.
Yeah I really don’t trust GUI package managers yet. I feel like they shouldn’t be that hard to get working properly, but I always seem to get quirky behavior when I try to use them. As for readability
aptis one of the worse tools IMO. I’ve been using nala lately and really like how it lays out its operations. Contrast that format to what Linus saw in his video.Maybe we could have a blacklist of packages/metapackages marked “important” that cause warnings, like xorg, pipewire, pulseaudio, kde-desktop, gnome-desktop, etc. If you’re uninstalling something like that you better hit confirm twice because that’s not typical behavior.