Re: sources.list: experimental
On Wed, Dec 03, 2008 at 12:40:56AM +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> Actualy you are verry wrong there. Not in what it is supposed to do
> but in what actually happens and why update is a good idea.
>
> As you say will do things involving adding or removing packages.
> Unfortunately it is not always too smart about that and result depend
> on the order of updates. For example:
>
> Package: foo
> Version: 1.2-3
> Depends: foo-simple (= 1.2-3) | foo-heavy (= 1.2-3)
>
> Now imagine you have foo 1.2-1 and foo-heavy 1.2-1 installed then
> dist-upgrade will want to update foo 1.2-3. That will have broken
> dependencies (foo-heavy 1.2-3 is not installed yet) so to fullfill
> them it will add foo-simple 1.2-3. Only later it hits foo-heavy 1.2-1
> and will also update that to 1.2-3.
I have never seen dist-upgrade do something that stupid. I have used
dist-upgrade exclusively for almost 10 years now without seeing anything
like that.
> By first doing an upgrade you have 2 effects:
>
> 1) many examples like above do get solved by upgrade
> 2) the number of packages for dist-upgrade is greatly reduced
> often resulting in a better solution, at least from my experience
Doing upgrade first just makes you have to do things in two steps, where
dist-upgrade alone in the first place would have done the job.
> PS: aptitude can be even more spectacular wrong if the dependencies
> are currently broken like often in sid. The non-GUI mode I find mostly
> unbearable.
Aptitide tries, but sometimes gets a bit carried away.
--
Len Sorensen
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