Re: Commence downloading for the beta test
On Wed, 17 Apr 1996, Bruce Perens wrote:
> Dale Scheetz is researching this topic and can send you a draft document
> on upgrading that will work. Write him at dwarf@polaris.net . I want
> to get in touch with Ian Jackson before I publish a definitive version.
>
One thing that I have noticed in my experience with upgrading is that
dselect (that is, dpkg) keeps the old packages in its database even if
they are purged and, most importantly, not even in the distribution
directories. This can make the upgrade very confusing for the user
unless s/he looks carefully at the information screen on each of the
packages. The best example is with the tput package which was necessary
for ncurses in the 0.93 release but is no longer in the 1.1. Another is
the X-servers which have all been renamed but whose old names persist.
If the user chooses one of these, there could be all sorts of conflicts
cropping up and there will definitely not be a package to install in the
tree. I was able to solve the problem only by going and editing the
'available', 'available-old', 'status', 'status-old' files to take out
references to the packages which are not installed and not in the
distribution tree.
I must qualify this comment by noting that I have not tired dpkg-1.1.5
with an upgrade as yet. I have noted that this version of dpkg
automatically uses the --force-overwrite option which does solve a lot of
installation problems.
Cheers
Carlo
***********************************************************************
* Carlo U. Segre *
* Department of Biological, Chemical and Physical Sciences *
* Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL 60616 *
* Voice: (312) 567-3498 FAX: (312) 567-3494 *
* segre@charlie.acc.iit.edu *
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