Short version:
Should users first upgrade dpkg and aptitude before upgrading the rest of
the system or can the upgrade safely be done using Woody's version of the
package tools?
Long version:
The current version of the release notes tells users to (simplified):
1. apt-get install aptitude
2. change the /etc/apt/sources.list to point to "stable"
3. aptitude update
4. aptitude -f --with-recommends dist-upgrade
Step 1. is meant to install the Woody version of aptitude, but of course
it will not if the sources.list already points to "stable" and the user
has already done an 'apt-get update'.
There have of course been improvements in Sarges version of aptitude. Also
I wonder if upgrading the packaging tools as part of the dist-upgrade
could in itself be a source of problems.
Therefore the question if it would be better to change the procedure to:
1. change the /etc/apt/sources.list to point to "stable"
2. apt-get update
3. apt-get install aptitude dpkg
4. aptitude -f --with-recommends dist-upgrade
???????
I have done an upgrade myself a while back using the second method [1] and
noticed:
- 'apt-get install aptitude' does _not_ upgrade dpkg automatically;
as it seemed to me better to have all package tools from the same
version, I upgraded both aptitude and dpkg before continuing with the
rest of the upgrade;
- in my test upgrading aptitude and dpkg also upgraded the following:
apt apt-utils aptitude debconf debconf-utils debhelper dpkg dpkg-dev
libc6 libc6-dev libdbd-mysql-perl libdbi-perl libgcc1 libncurses5
libncurses5-dev libpopt0 locales perl perl-base perl-modules whiptail
zlib1g
and installed:
debconf-i18n dselect gcc-3.3-base gettext intltool-debian
libdb1-compat libdb4.2 libgdbm3 liblocale-gettext-perl
libnet-daemon-perl libnewt0.51 libplrpc-perl libsigc++-1.2-5c102
libstdc++5 libtext-charwidth-perl libtext-iconv-perl
libtext-wrapi18n-perl linux-kernel-headers po-debconf slang1a-utf8
I understand that for some arches (hppa) this may necessitate upgrading
the kernel first.
Comments very, very welcome.
Cheers,
Frans Pop
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2004/11/msg00105.html
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