Re: Mozilla, netscape and potato to woody
Hello Helge,
I hope you don't mind, I've bounced this back to the debian-alpha list
because your questions are of a general nature and others can probably
improve on my answers...
Helge Kreutzmann wrote:
On Fri, Jun 14, 2002 at 05:07:09PM -0400, Adam C Powell IV wrote:
I'd strongly recommend using dselect or another frontend with
interactive dependency management when doing a potato->woody (or other
full version) upgrade. A lot of packages are more fine-grained now,
there are often multiple alternative "Provides:" options (e.g. you don't
want cxml-ev6 on an older machine!), and many of them have important
Suggests: or Recommends: packages which you will never hear about at all
if you simply "apt-get dist-upgrade".
Is this really the "only" way? I ask because I have to update a
computing pool and would really like to stick to a small shell script
for that (and I thought dist-upgrade was supposed to do the job?).
It does the job decently, but not perfectly, with exceptions as noted
(arbitrary choice among alternative Provides:, omits Suggests: and
Recommends:, etc.).
For a cluster of machines, I'd suggest the following:
1. Upgrade one machine by hand using dselect, etc. and make sure
you're comfortable with the resulting configuration.
2. On that machine, use "dpkg --get-selections \* > file" to generate
a complete package list (the \* is there to include all of the
removed and purged packages).
3. On the other machines, modify /etc/apt/sources.list, "apt-get
update", "dpkg --set-selections < file", "apt-get dselect-upgrade"
and they should have identical packages to the first machine.
Note that this can be repeated whenever you have to do a security
update, or add a new package.
There's also the diskless approach, but I'm not sure that's what you want.
The trouble with this is that you have to answer all of the debconf
questions and install all of the conf files, so the upgrade isn't
totally automated. Also, if certain machines need slightly different
package lists, things can get ugly (e.g. to support a CD burner, DVD,
athlon vs. sse optimized atlas, etc.).
Other ideas from the list?
Do you know a tool to display all "Suggest:" and "Recommends:" in an
easy parsable from ? Unfortunately dpkg -l "*" cuts the packages names
so it is unusable for using this as input to some other script (maybe
in connection with apt-cache, which unfortunately is not limited to
the installed packages only).
Does dpkg -s do what you want? It's like apt-cache show but only for an
installed package. (And only one package at a time.)
You could also probably hack something together by grepping
/var/lib/dpkg/available.
HTH,
--
-Adam P.
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