Toomas Karmo: Debian GNU/Linux 9.3 Released 2017-12-09

Quality assessment:

On the 5-point scale current in Estonia, and surely in nearby nations, and familiar to observers of the academic arrangements of the late, unlamented, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (applying the easy and lax standards Kmo deploys in his grubby imaginary "Aleksandr Stepanovitsh Popovi nimeline sangarliku raadio instituut" (the "Alexandr Stepanovitch Popov Institute of Heroic Radio") and his  grubby imaginary "Nikolai Ivanovitsh Lobatshevski nimeline sotsalitsliku matemaatika instituut" (the "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Institute of Socialist Mathematics") - where, on the lax and easy grading philosophy of the twin Institutes, 1/5 is "epic fail", 2/5 is "failure not so disastrous as to be epic", 3/5 is "mediocre pass", 4/5 is "good", and 5/5 is "excellent"): 2/5. Justification: This was a minor posting, with scanty content.


Revision history:

All times in these blog "revision histories" are stated in UTC (Universal Coordinated Time/ Temps Universel Coordoné,  a precisification of the old GMT, or "Greenwich Mean Time"), in the ISO-prescribed YYYYMMDDThhmmZ timestamping format. UTC currently leads Toronto civil time by 5 hours and currently lags Tallinn civil time by 2 hours.

• 20180115T2000Z/version 1.1.0: Kmo corrected a humiliating eror in the headline: he had had "Debian GNU/Linux 9.2 Released 2017-12-09", where what was needed was "Debian GNU/Linux 9.3 Released 2017-12-09". 
• 20171212T0201Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo uploaded an adequately finished version. He reserved the right to upload further tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undcoumented versions 1.0.1, 1.0.2, ... .

[CAUTION: A bug in the blogger server-side software has in some past months shown a propensity to insert inappropriate whitespace at some points in some of my posted essays. If a screen seems to end in empty space, keep scrolling down. The end of the posting is not reached until the usual blogger "Posted by Toomas (Tom) Karmo at" appears. - The blogger software has also shown a propensity, at any rate when coupled with my erstwhile, out-of-date, Web-authoring uploading browser, to generate HTML that gets formatted in different ways on different downloading browsers. Some downloading browsers have sometimes perhaps not correctly read in the entirety of the "Cascading Style Sheets" (CSS) which on all ordinary Web servers control the browser placement of margins, sidebars, and the like. If you suspect CSS problems in your particular browser, be patient: it is probable that while some content has been shoved into some odd place (for instance, down to the bottom of your browser, where it ought to appear in the right-hand margin), all the server content has been pushed down into your browser in some place or other. - Finally, there may be blogger vagaries, outside my control, in font sizing or interlinear spacing or right-margin justification. - Anyone inclined to help with trouble-shooting, or to offer other kinds of technical advice, is welcome to write me via Toomas.Karmo@gmail.com.]

I describe briefly my (routine, unremarkable) experience with last week's system upgrade. 

My migration was from Debian GNU/Linux 9.2 to Debian GNU/Linux 9.3. As with my description here at blogspot on 2017-10-12 or 2017-10-13 of an upgrade from Debian GNU/Linux 9.1 to Debian GNU/Linux 9.2, so again tonight I document my experience in the hope that a writeup will prove mildly helpful to a few people in the general Linux community. A report that something has gone smoothly can itself sometimes be useful, by providing a form of reassurance.

****

On Saturday morning, 2017-12-09, I saw the release notice for Debian GNU/Linux 9.3 pretty much as soon as it reached my e-mail inbox. I therefore presume I was alerted to the availability of the upgrade at most just hours after the actual release. It was, however, Saturday evening before I upgraded my workstation. 

****

I had been incrementally updating against an appropriate Debian Project mirror every few days, under Debian GNU/Linux 9.2. I was therefore likely to have been in a "zero-updates-needed" position Friday night - in other words, to have had my own personal-workstation "9.2" fully current in respect of the formal "9.2" definition. Perhaps as a consequence of this, updating against Saturday's "point release" (9.3, as distinct from 9.2) went quickly. 

In its current configuration (stable for the last few weeks?), my workstation has 2157 installed packages. Just 29 of these had to be updated in Saturday's transition from 9.2 to 9.3. No existing packages had to be removed, and no new packages had to be added. 

I followed the Debian Project recommendation to reboot after upgrading. 

****

To track the activity on my workstation, I generated lists of my 2157 installed packages with Debian's /usr/bin/dpkg -l command, both before and after my upgrade-cum-reboot. To examine how the two listings differed, I used the usual /usr/bin/diff tool. I show here just a portion of my /usr/bin/diff result, selecting a portion of the output relating to the kernel:

• linux-image-4.9.0-4-amd64             4.9.51-3
• linux-image-4.9.0-4-amd64             4.9.65-3

The same result regarding the kernel emerged from /bin/cat /proc/version, which I performed both before and after my upgrade-cum-reboot:

• Linux version 4.9.0-4-amd64 (debian-kernel@lists.debian.org) (gcc version 6.3.0 20170516 (Debian 6.3.0-18) ) #1 SMP Debian 4.9.51-1 (2017-09-28)
• Linux version 4.9.0-4-amd64 (debian-kernel@lists.debian.org) (gcc version 6.3.0 20170516 (Debian 6.3.0-18) ) #1 SMP Debian 4.9.65-3 (2017-12-03)

It can be seen from this /proc/version material that the new and the old kernel binaries were generated, from their respective C-or-similar source files, by the pertinent authority under the same major.minor.patch version (namely, 6.3.0) of the GNU C compiler.

[This is the end of the current blog posting.]