scripsit Marc Wilson: > On Thu, Dec 04, 2003 at 02:57:16PM -0700, Thanasis Kinias wrote: > > I wonder the same thing as Marc. > > You're not wondering the same thing as me... I know perfectly well > what the two targets do. It's Bill Moseley who's doing the wondering.
Sorry, brain-finger connection problem there. I do not doubt your expertise. > > I always do dist-upgrade also. Since I also always use -u, I'm not > > worried about its removing or installing things I don't want... > > Uh, no, all that does is show you what it's going to do without actually > *doing* it. It has nothing to do with what you're *allowing* it to do. > Assuming it shows you that it intends to remove a package, or install a new > one... what are you going to do then? Are you going to still turn it > loose, or are you going to investigate why? If I discover that it's going to remove something I need (for whatever reason), I will certainly investigate why, and use pins as necessary to prevent it. I'm not going to empower apt potentially to remove packages without checking with me first! > There should never be a reason to need 'dist-upgrade' if you're running > stable. That certainly makes sense. I should have mentioned, I suppose, that I run mostly testing -- so there is fairly often the need to do `dist-upgrade'. > Certainly. See above. If you don't want to give apt the power to > change the installation state of a package, you don't use > 'dist-upgrade'. Why would you give it that power, if it weren't > necessary? Let me rephrase that: Given that it is (for a system tracking testing) at times necessary to do `dist-upgrade', is there any reason not to do it always? The alternative is to do `upgrade' routinely, and then redo it with `dist-upgrade' when it fails occasionally, which (unless there's a good reason to do it that way) seems like adding a needless extra step. (Analogy: If a script will only ever be run by bash, why do `FOO=bar; export FOO' when `export FOO=bar' will do?) -- Pax vobiscum; pax cum omnibus. Thanasis Kinias tkinias at asu.edu Doctoral Student, Department of History Arizona State University Tempe, Arizona, U.S.A. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
