Re: Slink->Potato, Perl version

[Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>]

Marcus wrote:
> Is "apt-get upgrade" sufficient, and what does "apt-get dist-upgrade"
> do?

>From the apt-get man page:

       dist-upgrade
              dist-upgrade, in addition to performing  the  func­
              tion  of upgrade, also intelligently handles chang­
              ing 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.

It's best if you use dist-upgrade when doing major upgrades.

> I read that I should make sure all packages are _not_ on hold. Is there
> an easy way to do that without dselect?

dpkg --get-selections | sed 's/hold$/install/' | dpkg --set-selections
 
> Perl 5.6x is not in potato, and if I upgrade I'd like to ignore
> Perl-5.005 and get 5.6. How do I do that using apt-get?
> Primarily I'm interested in upgrading to Perl 5.6, latest Gnome, and
> Xfree 4 (It has TT-Fonts, I believe?), but from what I read, a system
> upgrade is recommended.

It sounds to me like you should consider upgrading to the testing
distribution. You could certianly upgrade a potato or even slink system
to all these things peicemeil, but these are such major components with
such far-reaching dependnacies that you would end up with a system
composed mostly of packages from testing anyway.

-- 
see shy jo