On Wed, Nov 27, 2002 at 08:06:22PM -0500, Tim Verry wrote: > Everytime I mess w/ the sources.list, and go into dselect, it seems to > arbitrarily choose a bunch of stuff to install. Well for instance adding > "testing" for the first time. I don't even select anything, and then there > is this mess of dependency and it ALWAYS wants to remove kdelibs4, libarts1, > and some other things, which would totally break a bunch of stuff I use (like > KDE for instance). If you added testing to your source.list then, you just asked dselect to try to upgrade your machine to testing. Of course it's going to go nuts selecting new things... > I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly what it has decided I should > install, WHY it is suddenly telling me to install anything, and why it would > favor older versions of anything. No idea. You might want to give aptitude a try though, since it handles this sort of thing nicely. Every package has a tree list below it of how (or if) it's dependencies are satisfied... > I've also noticed dozens of posts to this list with "apt-get ..." and almost > none that mention dselect, what's up with that? Because a lot of people find dselect to be horrid and unusable. Plus, if you're already in a terminal, then typing three words to install a new package is preferable to loading up a full-term app and wading through the package list. Also, apt ignores Suggests, which is considered a feature my some ;) Personally, I'm partial to 'aptitude install blah'. The simplicity of apt with the nifty cruft-trimming abilities of aptitude. > If I do an "apt-get upgrade" would that be roughly the same as just accepting > dselect's "suggestions" or whatever they are? How does apt-get resolve all > this mess while dselect seems to get confused? As I said above, apt ignores Suggest's lines. apt-get upgrade just goes and has a look at the list available versions and tries to install the latest version of everything. apt-get -dfuy dist-upgrade works a bit differently, but is essential for upgrading between diverging package trees and different releases. It does the same thing as apt-get upgrade, but will install new packages if necessary. > If I do an "apt-get upgrade" how I can I copy all the text into a file for > later perusal? If I > then it doesn't work as I can't answer the prompts. No idea. Aptitude logs everything it does to /var/log/aptitude.log though, which might be acceptable. -rob
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