OSCAR Autoupdate (Debian)

[BenB]

I did a bit of an systemwide upgrade session on my Debian 10 (Testing) system yesterday, and it appears that version 1.1.0-testing-3-3 got downloaded and installed. Rather than do an upgrade, it installed itself in a new location, deleted my desktop icon and took no notice of my original data location. Not very user friendly at all!

I just went back to the old version and all is well, but raise this as a concern to the developers and a warning to others if they suddenly think they've lost their data!

[Gideon]

Ben, can you be more specific please. Currently there is no auto-update in OSCAR. We are talking of having an Update Notification in a future release. That is a NOtification that a newer version is available.

What was your version of OSCAR originally, and exactly what was the version that was Auto-updated? The versions that were available for limited download were Testing-4 and Beta-1, Testing-4 is no longer available unless you are pulling directly from Git.

[BenB]

Hi Bonjour,

I did an apt-get update & upgrade, and it pulled oscar_1.1.0-testing-3-3_amd64 down from the *Testing* branch of Debian 10 (Bullseye)

My original package was oscar_1.0.1-r1_Debian9_amd64.deb

I only have debian (& virtualbox) repos in my sources.list, so I can only assume that it was posted there? I don't recall ever downloading from git; I'm fairly sure I only ever installed the .deb from your website (but you know what apnoea can do to an old man's brain!)

I have to admit that I always install packages as root, and missed the fact that wasn't recommended with OSCAR. I'll reininstall as my own user when the next release is available to prevent any future problems, if required.

As I say, no damage done to my install, so no worries. I just thought I'd better flag it in case someone had a panic.

Thanks for all your work with this package. It's very much appreciated.

[pholynyk]

It looks like the Debian Medical people have picked up OSCAR and put it in 10-Testing with the same package name as we are using. Since you had an OSCAR package on your system, it automatically upgraded to the Debian supported newer(-looking) version. And of course they implement the Debian standard file placements.

Where did everything end up in their version? I'm unlikely to start using Debian 10-Testing on my production desktop any time soon.

I don't know whether to applaud or cry.

[sawinglogz]

We should talk to the person who added it to their repo (sergiodj@debian.org). Looking at the progress of the package at <https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/oscar>, it looks like he's planning for this package to update sleepyhead users automatically. If that's the case, he really should be using 1.0.1-r1, not the alpha of the next release.

Obviously the source is always publicly available, so they can do whatever they want, but an alpha/beta release should not make it into a release branch of Debian. Based on the stated purposes of Debian testing and unstable, I'm not as worried about those.

Regardless, I'm guessing he just went with the latest tagged version and didn't realize it was an alpha.

We should also copy of his packaging tweaks upstream to make it easy for him to bring in a later version.

[BenB]

I'm pretty sure that the testing release in the repositories is not functional at all. If there are any other bleeding-edge Debian people about then I suggest you 'hold' the current version of oscar until it's working.

   sudo apt-mark hold oscar

I also had to copy the original install file into the cache, as it's not in any repository. (apt will stop working if it can't be found)

   sudo cp /home/ben/Downloads/oscar_1.0.1-r1_Debian9_amd64.deb /var/cache/apt/archives/.

No doubt at some point in the future we can "unhold" oscar and it will autoupdate automatically.

Ben

[pholynyk]

I haven't upgraded to Buster yet - b/c we said that OSCAR would run on Debian 9 (Stretch) - so I'm curious which version(s) of OSCAR are in Buster. What are your results from 'apt-policy oscar'? In particular is oscar only in the testing repository?
Thanks for the heads up.

[BenB]

I'm running the testing branch of Debian 10 - Bullseye - so I'm a little bit ahead of the curve. I've had no problems with oscar at all, and everything seemed to work as expected until this last hiccup

According to the package tracker at https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/oscar it is only available for Testing and Unstable (Bullseye and Sid) It's only just been migrated to testing, and personally I think that's a mistake as it's clearly not functional.

Anyway, policy info follows:

$ apt-cache policy oscar
oscar:
  Installed: 1.0.1-r1
  Candidate: 1.1.0-testing-3-3
  Version table:
     1.1.0-testing-3-3 500
        500 http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian bullseye/main amd64 Packages
 *** 1.0.1-r1 100
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

and my sources.list is as follows

$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ bullseye main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ bullseye main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org bullseye-security main non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org bullseye-security main non-free
deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian buster contrib

[pholynyk]

Thanks BenB - I'm glad it's only available in testing...
Here's the tag from our repo: v1.1.0-testing-3 A feature incomplete test version --- and that was 5 months ago

But I'm glad they are watching it...