Bug#747535: Please don't make upgrades noisier than necessary

[Carlos Alberto Lopez Perez]

On 10/05/14 05:26, Josh Triplett wrote:
> If the maintainers of the packages involved have done their jobs well
> (and they have), upgrading should be an entirely smooth process.  Much
> like upgrading to a new version of the Linux kernel or a new bootloader,
> you won't actually get the new version until you reboot, so there may be
> value in a "you need to reboot" reminder after finishing the upgrade,
> but that's true for just about every Debian major release upgrade.
> However, adding a new prompt *before* the upgrade just makes the upgrade
> process that much less pleasant for everyone who *doesn't* actually hold
> religious opinions about init systems, which in practice is a far
> greater chunk of Debian users than those who do.  In practice, upgrading
> from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 will have a more noticeable impact on the user,
> and we don't nag the user with a debconf prompt about that either, nor
> should we.
> 
> Upgrading from one Debian major release to another makes a large number
> of substantial changes to the system; for example, it may replace
> module-init-tools with the completely reimplemented kmod-based tools.
> Those changes don't merit debconf noise either.
> 

This makes sense when what is replaced not longer exists on Debian (that
are precisely you examples: GNOME2 or module-init-tools).

*But*, when you are replace something that will continue to be on Debian
and to be supported, then is a serious bug.

This bug is like if tomorrow Debian decides that default MTA should be
Postfix, and on upgrade you replace my MTA (Exim) with Postfix. I would
scream to you very loud.

The default has changed (systemd), but the previous default (sysvinit)
is *not* gone. So you can't replace it on upgrades without asking the
administrator first. Full period.

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