On Wednesday 17 May 2006 14:59, rs wrote:
[...]
> I'd like to upgrade from stable (sarge) to testing. Tried "aptitude
> upgrade" and it came back with 109 packages kept back.
[...]
> Obviously, I want kept back packages to be upgraded too (BTW, is there a
> way to find out why, specifically, those packages are kept back?). So, I
> tried "aptitude dist-upgrade" and it wants to install 695 new packages,
> including the ones I do not currently have or want (e.g evolution, gnome (I
> use KDE), exim, etc).
[...]
> Am I missing something? How do I upgrade only the packages that I currently
> have, without installing an obscene amount of new and unneeded/unwanted
> packages?
This is from man aptitude:
"upgrade
"Upgrades installed packages to their most recent version. Installed packages
will not be removed unless they are unused...; packages which are not
currently installed will not be installed...
"dist-upgrade
"Upgrades installed packages to their most recent version, removing or
installing packages as necessary..."
In other words, upgrade will hold back any package whose new version has new
dependencies or requires the removal of any package. Dist-upgrade will
install any new dependencies and remove any newly conflicting packages (it
automatically decides which packages must go when there is a conflict, or you
can control this by marking packages in various ways).
So I'm afraid what you're asking is not possible: the packages you have
installed must have their new dependencies if they are to be upgraded. And a
major change like the one from stable to testing will usually bring in a lot
of new dependencies.
It does seem odd that gnome is to be installed; do you mean the whole of
gnome, desktop environment and all? It must be that something you have
installed now needs at least parts of gnome.
To examine the situation in more detail, try running aptitude
with --show-deps.
I use Kpackage (a front-end for apt-get, so don't mix it with aptitude for
actually installing packages) because it's easy to browse package
descriptions and dependencies, and manually select multiple packages for
installation and removal.
I run testing and keep up-to-date by running update; upgrade; if any packages
are kept back I mark them for upgrade and carefully check what will be
changed, and only proceed if none of that bothers me (e.g., no packages I
want to use are to be removed).
Good luck,
John
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