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Re: 4.2.96 on Experimental



Hello,

On trečiadienis 22 Liepa 2009 00:17:50 you wrote:
> > Install (i.e. upgrade in this case, because lower versions are already
> > installed) packages, which have string 4:4.2.96 in their version number
> > (~V4:4.2.96) AND are already installed (~i), from the experimental target
> > release (-t experimental). Check aptitude manual "Search Term Reference".
>
> Why not using metapackes for upgrading?
> Experimental packages wont be automatically installed (upgraded) to my SID
> installation, if I do a "aptitude -t experimental install kde4" - what ist
> wrong?

1) kde4 metapackage no longer exists. Choose from kde-standard, kde-minimal, 
kde-full

2) Limiting yourself to metapackages, you limit yourself to the package set 
they depend on. This is pretty inconvenient because you cannot customize your 
installation. Some people might not want to use meta packages at all which is 
perfectly valid. Upgrading is "I want to install AVAILABLE newer versions of 
(KDE) packages which are already installed" which is what that command lets 
you to do. Upgrading via metapackages, you lose that AVAILABLE bit too. 
Basically whole KDE must be built, available and installable for you to 
upgrade via metapackage.

Frankly, I think kde-full metapackage is evil because it suffers from the 
"when I remove an official KDE application I don't care about, it removes the 
whole KDE" syndrome. That's because whatever you install via metapackage, they 
become "automatically installed" and will be autoremoved when the metapackage 
is removed (which happens when you remove an app the metapackage depends on). 
This is a chicken-egg problem with such metapackages which install too much. 
So I recommend to run the following to unmarkauto everything kde-full depends 
on hence you get more flexibility removing KDE packages you do not need:

# aptitude unmarkauto ~R^kde-full$

On the other hand, kde-minimal metapackage is OK and very welcome because if 
you are removing whatever kde-minimal depends on, you are obviously doing 
something wrong.

-- 
Modestas Vainius <modestas@vainius.eu>

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