On Tuesday 05 July 2005 12:43, Bill Wohler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>) wrote:
> How does one know when to use dist-upgrade? That's a good question, one which I can't really answer. I switched to aptitude without bothering to read any documentation. Since then, I've been constructing a "theory of operation" based on observation of how aptitude works. It's only about two weeks ago that I read the "aptitude user's guide"; of course, some of my theory turned out to be wrong. > Is there an announcement email somewhere? I'm not aware of such. > Does aptitude give some sort of a sign (that I'm missing)? I think I noticed the difference between 'upgrade' and 'dist-upgrade' when I saw that some packages aptitude listed as upgradable weren't upgraded with 'aptitude upgrade'. > Is this something that you just run regularly? Yes, but it's not something I really thought about until I started reading this thread. I (sort of) just "knew" when to use 'upgrade' and 'dist-upgrade'. > If this is something you run regularly on unstable, then I suppose one > should also run it regularly on testing. Right? I don't know remember much about testing. I switched to unstable after reading a thread about why running testing wasn't a good idea. > In that case, I should probably run it on my testing systems, eh? Here's my guess at an example: If and when Debian switches from XFree86 to X.org and these changes reach testing, at least some of the packages will conflict with each other. It's at that point where "upgrade" will not install X.org because it will require removal of the conflicting XFree86 packages. (This will be a relatively major change and not representative of day-to-day package maintenance.) > Since I had never run dist-upgrade during the entire sarge lifecycle, this > should be interesting... You can perform a simple test now. (1) If you're an apt-get user: Make sure your system up-to-date with 'apt-get update && apt-get upgrade'. Then, run 'apt-get --simulate dist-upgrade' and see if it wants to do install and/or remove anything. (2) If you're an aptitude user: Make sure your system up-to-date with 'aptitude update && aptitude upgrade'. Then, as an unprivileged user, run 'aptitude' and press the 'g' key and see if it wants to do install and/or remove anything. Don't continue if you don't like the result; aptitude won't continue without the root password anyway. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
