Andreas Tscharner <starf...@sunrise.ch> writes: > On 12.09.2015 21:23, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> I've been able to upgrade normally during the entire gcc-5 transition. > Lucky you! > aptitude wanted to remove 45 packages yesterday. I spent about 5 hours to > manually resolve dependencies by uninstalling packages, removing lib* > packages, adding lib*v5 packages and adding the uninstalled packages again > to get ALL dependencies resolved > I am not sure it it's a problem of aptitude or the resolver in general, > but I was not able to "just update". I stopped using aptitude for routine upgrades a while back. My experience with aptitude is that the first solution is almost always wrong, and the second solution is sometimes better than the first solution that apt comes up with. That means it's a bad choice for day-to-day use, since you'll have to constantly fight with the first suggestion. For future transitions, if you want a closer experience to mine, I recommend: 1. Upgrade frequently (every day) if you can. Don't let it sit too long and accumulate complexity. 2. Use apt upgrade first, then apt dist-upgrade only if things are still held back. If apt dist-upgrade can't find a good solution or wants to remove a bunch of stuff, just ignore it and try again the next day (but keep running apt upgrade). It will often stay in that state for a while during transitions until all the packages have been rebuilt. That's normal and not a problem; the only problem is that some packages may become temporarily uninstallable, which is not solvable by any package management tool. 3. Use apt-get autoremove frequently so that the resolver doesn't have to figure out how to upgrade packages you're not even using. 4. Use aptitude for the nice interactive interface or if you really need to install something and feel like paging through multiple solutions, but not for routine upgrades. I've been doing this through two release cycles, and have had almost none of the problems that other people have reported. Now, that could well be because I don't have a ton of desktop environment packages installed, which tend to involve the most complex dependency chains. (In particular, it sounds like there's a KDE transition that's pretty complicated right now, and is probably causing the issues of the original poster.) But I think some of it has to do with keeping the work of the resolver relatively light, and using the apt resolver instead of aptitude's. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
