Last weekend the Debian project released Etch, and so this morning I sat down and upgraded my main home Linux machine. I now have a mostly working Etch system in front of me, which is nice.

The biggest serious problem was the complete replacement of /usr/X11R6/bin with a symlink; Debian automatically got rid of most of the contents of the old directory but missed a few things, resulting in me receiving unhelpful and confusing messages for a while until I lost my patience and started forcibly uninstalling any package that looked as if it was in the way. As it turned out, though, this was in fact the right strategy, so that was all right.

Apart from that, actual headaches during installation were minimal; there were lots of scary-looking package uninstalls, but almost all of them turned out to be because the package in question had been renamed or made virtual, and very few things actually turned up missing when the upgrade was complete.

That said, the two notable things which did end up AWOL, namely MediaWiki and CUPS, both needed reconfiguring nearly from scratch when I reinstalled them. Not too impressed with that, although both appear to be basically working again now. I think.

The single funniest moment of the upgrade, however, was when I was in the middle of a long series of aptitude commands and they suddenly stopped working, because aptitude had somehow contrived to uninstall itself and terminate without installing an upgraded version in its place. That was just breathtakingly impressive; I'm not sure I could have written a packaging system capable of that if I'd tried. Still, when I installed the upgraded aptitude by other means, everything proceeded mostly smoothly from there.

GNOME seems to have made Nautilus more mandatory than before, which is annoying. I quite like the various GNOME bits and pieces such as gnome-panel but dislike my root window being covered in pointless file manager icons, because I prefer using the command line for file management. So I used to get rid of Nautilus by removing it in the session control panel, but that no longer works because it just comes back the next time I log in. I'm currently working around that by means of a nasty script which executes gnome-session-remove nautilus shortly after every login, but that's race-condition-ridden and so I hope to think up a better way at some point.

This post would under other circumstances be a rant, but in fact when I compare this experience to my last Debian upgrade, it looks downright painless by comparison. So, one and a half cheers for Debian this time round; let's see if it can be even less painful next time.