I wrote a small review of Vero 4K + I just got.
Maybe I missed or f**cked up something obvious in the review and in this case let me know here…
Well your comments about upgrade vs dist-upgrade are totally off. Generally under Debian dist-upgrade is recommended as it is the only command that ensures dependencies while upgrading. If you run upgrade no packages will be installed that are not already installed which could break your system.
Other than that your crashes while navigating through the menus are very odd (never had that in 2 years of usage). That would either indicate a power problem or some addons playing bad.
" Generally under Debian dist-upgrade is recommended"
That is not AFAIK true. Sure, if you want it to “just work” then yes, you run “dist-upgrade” and the magic happens and for many people (who do not really care about the actual packages) it will just work. Problem is if new version of some package requires some new dependency or removes already existing dependency (in which case that removed dependency could get purged from your system). Some (power) users prefer to know exactly what packages will potentially be removed or added and want to be warned first before that happens. You have no such warning with “dist-upgrade”.
Note that I do not say that “dist-upgrade” is bad and I have no deep problem with OSMC preferring it, but discouraging users from “upgrade” is just weird, because the command itself is considered to be completely safe as it simply keeps existing versions of packages whose deps have changed in new to-be-installed version, which is the exact behavior which some “power users” want.
Here’s the page from debian themselves… No mention of upgrade…
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/ch-uptodate.en.html#s-apt
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Thanks for taking the time to post a review.
Firstly – the device shouldn’t be crashing, and I’d like to get that resolved for you. Could you upload some logs via My OSMC -> Logs when the device freezes again?
By BSOD: are you seeing a sad face?
I do not recommend using apt-get upgrade. The OSMC update processes run apt-get dist-upgrade. The Debian maintainer’s manual recommends the use of dist-upgrade; and has done so since 1999. apt-get upgrade can (and has in the past before) result in a broken system. It can also make it very hard to track down issues because it is not always apparent that this has been done.
If you want to see what will be upgraded before doing it, I believe you can run apt-get -s dist-upgrade.
Cheers
Sam
Firstly – the device shouldn’t be crashing, and I’d like to get that resolved for you. Could you upload some logs via My OSMC -> Logs when the device freezes again?
By BSOD: are you seeing a sad face?
Yes, sad faces. I will turn on logging once I setup Vero at my house and will for sure let you know if anything goes wrong.
As for upgrade vs dist-upgrade. I completely understand your position and I already sad that dist-upgrade is not “bad”, but for certain group of users who know what they are doing, upgrade is not “bad” too and might actually be preferred. That’s what I meant to say.
I also noticed couple of other weird things but have no logs, for example I tried to play one 4K file two times.
First time I played it, I checked the info and it said that it is played via SW decoding. Second time I tried, the info said that it plays with HW decoding (aml-vp9 something). I will investigate issue too.
If you use apt-get upgrade on OSMC, you can and will damage your system.
It is not recommended.
We will need to see some logs re. issues reported.
The best answer :
The upgrade option only installs new version of the packages that are already installed on the system (and yes, kernel updates belong to them).
However, sometimes the updates change dependencies: for example, a new version of a package will no longer depend on a library that you have installed, or will require installation of additional libraries. The upgrade option will never remove installed packages that you no longer actually need.
However, the dist-upgrade option can “intelligently” handle changes in the dependencies system. This includes removing packages that are no longer necessary or resolve conflicts between packages that arose because of changes in the dependencies.
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Sure, will remember that I should stick with dist-upgrade.
Yes, I completely understand difference between those two commands. By the way dist-upgrade is not more “intelligent” than upgrade is, it just refuses to upgrade package which has new/removed dependencies. Upgrade resolves all dependencies correctly to.
Actually many errors which come from using upgrade are caused by improperly packaged packages where their packager forgot to list some actually used dependent SW as “dependency”. If this happens and user runs (otherwise completely safe) “partial upgrade” and only upgrades packages without any new/removed dependencies, it might happen that some other un-upgraded package actually relied on some specific functionality which was removed from another newly-upgraded package (“partial upgrade”). Some distributions specifically “do not support” this kind of approach (for example Arch).
It just seems that Debian/apt-based distros are little more vulnerable to SW breakage because of partial upgrades than other distros and thus I completely understand your warnings and take them to heart.