UPGRADE ANNOYANCES

Upgrades have never really enthused me much. Indeed this is the 
whole idea behind my 'Internet Client' system running upt-to-date 
internet-related software on a headless low-power computer which I 
access remotely from computers running ancient OSs which already 
did everything I wanted from them a decade ago or longer. That 
works fairly well because I only have to worry about upgrade 
hassles that arise from the internet-related software that I use. 
Although I set up a newer laptop with a Devuan-based Linux distro 
around the same time that I started using 'icli', thanks to it I've 
been able to stick happily with the ~22 year old Pentium III 
Thinkpad that I was using before.

Yet on some occasions the 'new' (~17 year old) laptop has come in 
handy. Mostly when I'm away from home by booting up to the Micro SD 
card that runs 'icli', but as that runs a really odd Linux distro 
(obscure enough that mentioning its name might harm my anonymity), 
I have found the Devuan system handy sometimes too. It's handy for 
running software required for my electronics work like the giant 
(yet functionally unimpressive) MPLAB IDE from Microchip, and 
testing out weird software projects like that failed attempt to 
make a universal static build of PuTTY after it entered to the evil 
world of CMake.

Nevertheless it basically sits for months doing nothing between 
these brief calls to duty, so it's somewhat frustrating that its 
distro is approaching EOL and I'm forced to upgrade. More annoying 
yet an upgrade from Devuan Beowulf (Debian Buster/10) to Devuan 
Daedalus (Debian Bookworm/12) needs around 2GB of downloaded data, 
so I had to wait for one of the few times a year I can latch onto 
someone else's internet connection which isn't metered like mine. 
Then of course time is limited, so it's especially annoying when it 
all goes wrong, Apt aborts after upgrading lots of software to 
versions built for a new GlibC version but before actually 
upgrading GlibC, and leaves me with a completely broken system 
where most commands fail with a GlibC version mis-match error, 
networking is broken, and I can't even log into a new terminal 
session anymore.

I eventually found that the source of the problem was that the Perl 
binary was now dynamically linked to a library called libcrypt1, 
which hadn't been installed yet. The package installation scripts 
use Perl, so it all fails. For anyone similarly unlucky, the 
solution is:
  sudo dpkg --force-all -i /var/cache/apt/archives/libcrypt1*

Ignore the screen-full of warnings and run "sudo apt-get 
full-upgrade" again, then it should all run nicely. Except it turns 
out Apt uninstalled Xorg, which is rather unfriendly. Maybe this is 
someone's subtle gesture to push people towards Wayland, but at 
least manually installing Xorg and drivers again got things back to 
normal.

Less easily fixed are the packages which turn out to have been 
removed from Debian altogether. One is a Qt4 program which I'd 
usually run on my old laptop anyway, like so much other software 
dropped from Debian much longer ago, so it's not much hassle. The 
other is more frustrating, because it's one I actually run on my 
VPS, which I also need to upgrade before Devian/Devuan 10 goes 
unsupported. More frustrating yet, the reason it was dropped is 
because it failed to build and the maintainer says "dead upstream", 
yet a look on the news page of the project's Sourceforge project 
shows that they just switched over to the JS-obsessed land of 
GitHub, where my GophHub front-end shows newer version has been 
released. Clearly the package maintainer didn't actually care about 
it very much if they didn't even look that far. This is with 
Debian, the wonderful shining light of software support in Linux - 
what hope have you got?

Then there's OpenWrt. I don't really know why I'm so obsessed about 
upgrading it. In part it's just a challenge to see if I can keep 
the under-powered hardware running up-to-date Linux, but as it's 
also directly internet-facing it's at least theoretically bad to 
have really old software running on it, although looking through 
the actual vulnerabilities to see whether any are real security 
threats for my usage is a career in itself. Anyway OpenWrt 23 is 
mostly running alright, but _sometimes_ it isn't. Somehow the issue 
with running out of RAM at start-up seems to be intermittent, so 
sometimes it boots up without issue, sometimes it kills some 
processes but everything works anyway, other times it kills the 
firewall configuration process and that stops internet networking 
dead. I can't really make sense of why the behaviour changes, it's 
the same configuration and software each time, but the only thing 
that seems to solve the problem is disabling the logd syslog 
service which frees sufficient RAM for everything to squeek 
through. Yet then for some reason without a log process internet 
access via mobile broadband gets completely broken and won't work 
at all (and I can't debug it, without a log to read), so I can't do 
that. It seems I might have finally met my match with that then. I 
suspect the switch from iptables to nftables for the firewall had a 
lot to do with it, but that actually happened in the previous 
release so there's more bloat somewhere else now too.

At times like these I can't help but wonder at the folly of it all. 
I sometimes look at phoronix.net where there's an endless reel of 
news about Linux and related software development. I'm sure most of 
the new features in Linux impress someone, but really I can't think 
of when I saw one that was genuinely exciting to me. Often when a 
performance improvement is claimed, the details reveal how it's 
really quite a specific edge case which doesn't really matter at 
all for my usage anywhere. I also often wonder if you looked back 
far enough whether the performance limitation was only introduced 
as a consequence of some other feature added years/decades earlier, 
but nobody does because only some nut like me is running Linux that 
old anyway. Running it, and noticing how much faster it does run. 
Huff.

So I think I'll give up on the router upgrades, up to and possibly 
including OpenWrt 23. That annoyingly still leaves three systems I 
need to worry about upgrades on - the 'new' laptop, which I use for 
so few tasks that breakages aren't a huge issue, but I need GBs of 
data to actually do the upgrades and that makes it awkward if the 
upgrade goes wrong. My VPS, where an upgrade problem like that on 
the laptop could quite likely leave me completely locked out of the 
thing and forced to do a fresh installation, and either way I have 
to start compiling software for it myself that Debian doesn't want 
to package anymore. Then there's my Internet Client, which doesn't 
need so much data for upgrades and I can generally be set up more 
specifically how I like it to be, although I do have to compile a 
lot of software for it myself which really makes it the most 
maintenance overall.

Oh what a pain it all is. There is a project for very long-term 
security support of selected Linux kernel versions. If only a 
desktop/server distro would centre itself around that, and get 
enough interest that application software projects have cause to 
maintain compatibility with it? One can dream...
https://www.cip-project.org/

 - The Free Thinker