[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Reboot Cycle

[From: Carlos Guerreiro]

> On Wed, 30 Aug 2006 11:25:04 +0300
> Marius Vollmer <marius.vollmer at nokia.com> wrote:
> 
> > "ext Johannes Eickhold" <jeickhold at gmx.de> writes:
> > 
> > > I think it would be a good idea not to say "You can freely alternate
> > > between AI 2006 and apt-get, say. Changes done to the system via apt-get
> > > or dpkg are picked up by the AI 2006 without confusing it, and vice
> > > versa." like [1] does, if it can cause so much trouble.
> > 
> > Hmm.  That sentence is pretty accurate, so why should we remove it?
> > 
> > It is not a guarantee, of course, that all changes to your system that
> > you make with apt-get will be good ones.  There could be a warning
> > about that, but I think it should be pretty obvious that when you muck
> > around in your system as root that you need to be careful, no? ;)
> 
> Absolutely.
> 
> However the expectations of a typical Linux user are: apt-get upgrade
> should be harmless if my sources.list points to a stable release (such
> as "mistral").
> 
> I think it is a bad idea to make your system work contrary to the user's expectations.
> 
> > Then again, having a package in the official maemo mistral repository
> > that will break your device is very bad, too.  "Someone should do
> > something about this".

Totally agree. It is very unfortunate that this happened. In addition,
all package versions in the repository should have matched those on the
device, since maemo2.0 is meant as a snapshot of Maemo components fully
in sync with IT2006. It should have been so that running 'apt-get
upgrade' on the device from the mistral repository would not pull in any
new package version.

> 
> I suggested on IRC yesterday to modify the postinst script of
> maemo-af-desktop (or whatever the package that restarts an important
> process and causes the lifeguard to reboot) to not stop/restart the
> process.  Consider gdm as an analogy in the big desktop world: I can
> apt-get upgrade gdm in an xterm in a running X session, and the package
> scripts do not kill/restart it in that case.

I believe it's maemo-launcher. That's the only package apt will try
upgrade when running 'apt-get upgrade' on the device from the mistral
repository.

This has been fixed in Sardine for the future.

> (I'd be interested in experimenting with this if I had a spare Nokia 770 that I wasn't afraid of breaking.)

Try dual booting, see Marius's reply.