[pkg-bacula-devel] Bug#1109499: bacula-director-sqlite3: fails to dist-upgrade from bookworm to trixie

[Adrian Bunk]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2025 at 12:12:55PM +0200, Carsten Leonhardt wrote:
>...
> should we recommend upgrading to bacula from backports before the
> dist-upgrade in the release notes? That will perform the database
> upgrade and seems like an easy workaround.

no, backports shouldn't become a requirement for a regular upgrade from 
one release to the next release. It would also not make a difference 
with the problem at hand that the user is forced to answer (or preseed
a debconf answer) for something that is not necessary.


On Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 06:44:17PM +0200, Carsten Leonhardt wrote:
>...
> B) Default to "Yes" (applies to all scenarios)
>
>   If we switch the default for all scenarios to "Yes, go ahead with the
>   update", I fully expect to receive bug reports about failed upgrades
>   and I can imagine the frustration of people with big installations
>   that only notice hours (or days) later that the upgrade broke and they
>   need to do a restore that can then take another few hours, just to get
>   to the point where they started from.
>...

Is it true that they would "only notice hours (or days) later"?

The expected error handling would be:
1. bacula-director-$db.postint fails, aborting the upgrade with a clear
   error message for the administrator
2. administrator creates required space
3. attempting again to upgrade the package is successful and results in
   a correctly upgraded database

What actually matters is that this error handling works,
since some users will always hit this problem no matter
how often and how annoyingly you informed them.


Regarding bacula-common.preinst, it is much better for our users to read 
the release notes once instead of having to deal with release notes in 
the form of dozens of debconf questions on every single machine being 
upgraded.

debconf is for configuring packages, not for forcing information on users.

It seems something has already been added to the release notes:
https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/issues.html#bacula-director-database-schema-update-needs-large-amounts-of-disk-space-and-time

Release notes and NEWS.Debian are for informing users, you already have 
both of these now.


> Regards
> 
> Carsten

cu
Adrian