Well, I havn't seen this recently. Maybe because aptitude has rename 'upgrade' do 'safe-upgrade', to make it obvious, that 'dist-upgrade' might do unwanted things.

Back when I was the maintainer of the galeon webbrowser package, I got bug reports and reports on IRC each time the mozilla packages was updated.

The galeon package used to have a conflict with mozilla of any newer major version than the one it was built with. This was a good thing - mozilla APIs were chaning, and when Mozilla was upgraded from let's say version 1.5 to 1.6, it would break galeon. Galeon would at least need to be recompiled or might even need source changes. So there was plenty of reason to add this conflic.

People were using 'dist-upgrade' all the time, and what dist-upgrade did then was to upgrade the mozilla package by removing galeon. And they couldn't even install galeon back again, because the new mozilla had replaced the old mozilla in unstable. And each time, I basically had to tell people "well, you shouldn't have used 'dist-upgrade', it's for upgrading between major version of Debian, not for daily use.

In fact, running dist-upgrade right now would uninstall 'iceweasel-dom-inspector' for me. I guess this is exactly due to the same reasons.

I'm wondering whether we should maybe do a 'uninstall-ok' list (or 'dist-upgrade-hints') and ship it with the distribution. I'd then modify the 'dist-upgrade' command to

• removing any package in this 'hints' list to satisfy dependencies is okay (i.e. as it is now for any package)
• prompt for confirmation for any other package

So let's say there was experimental-browser in some revision, built with mozilla version 1.7, and conflicting to mozilla 1.8. The browser is discontinued, and ends up in the 'uninstall-hints' file. If the user does a dist-upgrade, it will be removed as usual.

However, if 'galeon' has such a conflict and is still alive, it won't be listed in unstables 'uninstall-hints' file, and thus not considered for automatic uninstallation. So people who unnecessarily run dist-upgrade will still suffer less (unless they chose to remove it anyway!)

However, if the user has built his own 'custom-webbrowser' package, it will cause a bigger warning when running dist-upgrade, because aptitude doesn't have that package in the hints file. So the users of local packages actually have a benefit here, too.

P.S. Sorry; I don't have time to follow planet debian these days. Still if you have feedback it's recommended to use planet or the mailing lists!

Yesterday, my laptop locked up hard. So hard, it wouldn't turn on afterwards, but flash an error code. Unfortunately, Dell hides the relevant information very well - it took me some time to find in the forums that the error code means bad memory.

After removing the memory module from slot B, I could turn my computer back on again. So either the module is dead or the mainboard part related to it.

I bought my laptop second-hand in the US last year, and warranty probably is just over. Still I wanted to make sure that this isn't covered by warranty anymore, so I tried contacting Dell support.

What a pain. No reply yet to my mail inquiry; and the "support chat" doesn't work right. Their support agent always asks for my phone number (WTF?) and then after some minutes says he's going to disconnect because I don't reply.

I wonder if they ever tested their support chat with Gecko-based browsers.

0 out of 5 stars for Dell support so far. Important information is inaccessible and the support doesn't reply in either email nor chat. It's not even giving bad replies.