I had a few packages installed from the Feisty Fawn universe and multiverse repositories (wordpress, clamav) on top of my Edgy Eft installation, and the mixed version setup worked well. Clamav was updated to depend on a library (libc, I think) that was not available in Edgy Eft, and Apt was smart enough to just leave clamav at the existing version. Also, I had made quite a few local customizations to configuration files for dovecot imapd (enabling non-secure IMAP connectons since they only happen over my home LAN), /etc/services (adding VMWare’s admin service and a second Subversion repository), and a couple of others.

I started by changing ‘edgy’ to ‘feisty’ in /etc/apt/sources.list, clearing out the old CD-ROM source line (from my original installation from ISO images) and duplicate universe and multiverse lines (from my mixed installation).

I then did apt-get update, and apt-get -d dist-upgrade (-d means download but don’t install) and let that run (300+ MB of stuff to download, might as well let it run while I sleep).

This morning I ran apt-get dist-upgrade and babysat it. There were a couple of things that it said it would uninstall that I had to reinstall: libapache2-mod-python (needed by Trac), ruby18-elisp (not automatically upgraded to ruby19-elisp, but that was easy to manually install), and libnet-perl, which appears to be broken currently. That last one would seem to be the first of two genuinely broken things in this upgrade, though I can’t think of anything I use that depends on it.

There were a half dozen or so manual config file merges that I had to do; I wish one of the options were to attempt an automatic merge of the existing, customized version and the new, vanilla version. Nothing I changed really required manual intervention; all I did was what patch could have done just as easily. Tedious, but not really a problem. This effort probably added 5 minutes total.

After all that, it rebooted cleanly but Trac doesn’t work anymore. Apparently Trac depends on Clearsilver which reportedly is an antique and obsolete template system that isn’t currently built for Python 2.5, which is part of ubuntu-minimal on Feisty. I have a lead on fixing this manually but I haven’t done it yet. I expect this to be fixed for me in an official package in the next week or less; several folks know about it and say the fix is percolating through the package system already. So I might not bother with the manual fix.

The reboot went fine. I then updated VMware Server, which required a bit of manual assistance, but then it always does. Here’s what I did: VMWare Server in Feisty.

I haven’t upgraded my VPS yet but I’ll do that soon. I want to check with my VPS hosting support folks first to see if they know of any gotchas.

The Ubuntu folks create a release and then don’t change anything in that release except for security updates. Unfortunately WordPress is not a supported package in Ubuntu-land. It’s part of the Universe component of the Ubuntu software repository, which means it’s not a core package that the Ubuntu team obsesses over, but rather a community-contributed package. It’s up to the community at large to update the WordPress package and upload it, so that the so-called Masters of the Universe can publish it to the Ubuntu-loving masses. That also means that security updates to WordPress aren’t backported to Edgy.

The latest WordPress packages appear in the bleeding-edge Feisty Fawn release which is being assembled and will be officially released in April 2007. What to do between now and then, when there’s security fixes (WordPress 2.0.5 and 2.0.6) to be had?

Easy. Well, actually, not easy at all, it’s complicated as hell to understand, but quick to accomplish. Part of the problem is that the APT HOWTO uses Debian terminology that doesn’t apply to Ubuntu. The other part of the problem is that Apt-Pinning for Beginners is overcomplicated and is also Debian-specific.

Here’s what I did: I told Apt to use Edgy by default, but to also be aware of some Universe packages from the Feisty release. That allowed me to ask it to please install the Feisty version of WordPress. Here’s the techie details:

1) Add this to /etc/apt/apt.conf (I had to create this file on one of my servers):
APT::Default-Release "edgy";
That makes it prefer the Edgy Eft release, as opposed to just choosing the latest package available. So even when it can see the newer Feisty Fawn packages, it won’t suggest that you upgrade to them. You’ll have to ask explicitly for them.

2) Make a copy of this line:
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy universe multiverse
And change the “edgy” to “feisty”, and you get this:
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty universe multiverse
Now Apt will see all those newer packages, but because of step 1, it won’t do anything differently.

3) Tell Apt to install a package and specify a “target release” that you want it to use when looking in its sources for the version to install.
apt-get -t feisty install wordpress
That says to override the Edgy default release and look in Feisty for WordPress.

As it turns out this is documented in the APT HOWTO under
how to keep a mixed system but the key bits I was missing were that you can just say edgy instead of stable and that’s all it takes to make it work on Ubuntu.

The other thing I hadn’t realized is that I could wait forever and WordPress 2.0.5+ would never be backported to Edgy because they’re in the Universe, so I have no choice but to work with the Feisty release of the Universe section if I want those security updates. Since the Edgy release of the Universe is no more or less supported than the Feisty release of the Universe, there’s really nothing lost there; nobody is promising that the Edgy Universe is super stable and tested. So, really, it might be safe to just undo step 1 and let Apt find all the Feisty Universe packages and suggest that it update them now. But I feel like being conservative about my servers so I keep them at the latest stable release + security updates, which is what I’ve got now.

Related: wordpress: new upstream: 2.0.6