Re: apt-get and "kept back" packages

[Dale Scheetz <dwarf@polaris.net>]

On Wed, 29 Nov 2000, Josh Huber wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 29, 2000 at 11:03:45AM -0500, Dale Scheetz wrote:
> > While trying to figure out why man doesn't work on my machine I did
> > another "upgrade" from potato using apt-get. Before this program gets down
> > to the meat of downloading and installing packages, it gives a substantial
> > list of packages that it says "have been kept back". There are many
> > important packages on this list, including man-db (which seems to be why
> > man refuses to find any manpages on my system).
> > 
> > A check with dpkg -s mandb shows that the old named file is installed. 
> > apt-get seems to know about the new file (man-db), as it declares it by
> > name, but seems unwilling to install it, replacing the older mandb
> > package. This is supposed to be handled properly using replaces,
> > conflicts, and provides, so why is apt-get choking? What happened to our
> > "seamless" upgrade process?
> > 
> > Is there any "automatic" way to get these issues resolved? Why is apt-get
> > unable to resolve this issue?
> > 
> > At this point I must investigate all 25 files individually and figure out
> > what to do about them, one at a time. Is there a better way to deal with
> > this weak behavior?
> 
> I think what you want is dist-upgrade:
> 
> apt-get(8):
>        dist-upgrade
>               dist-upgrade,in addition to performing the function
>               of upgrade,  also  intelligently  handles  changing
>               dependencies with new versions of packages; apt-get
>               has a "smart" conflict resolution  system,  and  it
>               will attempt to upgrade the most important packages
>               at the expense of less important ones if necessary.
>               The  /etc/apt/sources.list  file contains a list of
>               locations from which to  retrieve  desired  package
>               files.
> 
> so, instead of apt-get upgrade,
> apt-get dist-upgrade

Thanks! I've read that paragraph several times and it never made the clear
sense that it does now ;-)

Now that I understand that, the use of the other option becomes unclear.

What benefit do I get from using upgrade instead of dist-upgrade?

On another point, I tried several specific upgrade commands and got
varying degrees of dependency satisfaction.

apt-get install man-db

Was very interesting. It treated man-db as an upgrade (correctly) and
(also correctly) declared that it would install the new package libdb2.

So I got adventurous and tried:

apt-get upgrade bdsmainutils

(the first package on the list of "kept back" packages)

This pulled in many of the other "kept back" packages as the dependencies
for the bsdmainutils package.

So, maybe I've already answered my other question:

upgrade grabs dependencies on specified packages, but not when used
without specific arguments.

dist-upgrade does the same for global upgrades.

Thanks for the feedback,

Dwarf
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