I'm finding this discussion of apt/aptitude somewhat confusing.
I rendered the text to html, did a proof-read, and came up with
the attached patch against r5510.
Does this help simplify things?
There are a handful of copy-editing changes along the way.
Cheers
Vince
Index: upgrading.dbk
===================================================================
--- upgrading.dbk (revision 5510)
+++ upgrading.dbk (working copy)
@@ -704,9 +714,9 @@
<section id="aptupgrade1st">
<title>Upgrade apt and/or aptitude first</title>
<para>
- Several bug reports have shown <systemitem
+ Several bug reports have shown that the versions of the <systemitem
role="package">aptitude</systemitem> and <systemitem
- role="package">apt</systemitem> in etch are often unable to
+ role="package">apt</systemitem> packages in etch are often unable to
handle the upgrade to &releasename;. In &releasename;, <systemitem
role="package">apt</systemitem> better deals with complex chains
of packages requiring immediate configuration and <systemitem
@@ -714,28 +724,32 @@
solutions for satisfying the dependencies. As these two features
are heavily involved during the dist-upgrade to &releasename;, it
is then required to upgrade those two packages before upgrading
- anything else:
+ anything else. For <systemitem role="package">apt</systemitem>, run:
<programlisting># apt-get install apt</programlisting>
- (and <systemitem role="package">aptitude</systemitem>, if you have
- used it before and want to re-use the automatically-installed
- information) or
+ and for <systemitem role="package">aptitude</systemitem> (if you have
+ it installed) run:
<programlisting># aptitude install aptitude</programlisting>
</para>
</section>
<section id="aptconvert">
- <title>Use aptitudes list of automatically-installed with apt</title>
+ <title>Using aptitude's list of automatically-installed packages with
apt</title>
<para>
+ <systemitem role="package">aptitude</systemitem> maintains a list
+ of packages that were installed automatically (for instance, as
+ dependencies of another package). In &releasename;, <systemitem
+ role="package">apt</systemitem> now has this feature as well.
+ </para>
+ <para>
The first time the &releasename; version of <systemitem
role="package">aptitude</systemitem> is run, it will read in its
list of automatically installed packages and convert it for use
with the &releasename; version of <systemitem
- role="package">apt</systemitem> (which can handle
- automatically-installed information). If you use <systemitem
- role="package">apt</systemitem> as package manager, you should at
+ role="package">apt</systemitem>. If you have <systemitem
+ role="package">aptitude</systemitem> installed, you should at
least issue one <systemitem role="package">aptitude</systemitem>
- command to do the conversion. For instance, searching for no
- package:
- <programlisting>aptitude search "?false"</programlisting>
+ command to do the conversion. One way to do this is by searching for
+ a non-existent package:
+ <programlisting># aptitude search "?false"</programlisting>
</para>
</section>
