Re: Today mozilla-firebird Wants To Remove KDE

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Sun, Aug 24, 2003 at 01:27:52PM -0400, David Crane wrote:
> In the other branch of this thread, I asked whether multiple rounds of
> "apt-get upgrade" would be needed to bring a 3.0rev1 "woody" distribution
> up to a current "testing" distribution.

Here's the documentation of 'upgrade' from the apt-get(8) man page: note
the "under no circumstances" bit, which is important for a distribution
like testing or unstable where packages are in substantial flux.

       upgrade
              upgrade is used to install the newest  versions  of  all
              packages  currently  installed  on  the  system from the
              sources enumerated  in  /etc/apt/sources.list.  Packages
              currently  installed  with  new  versions  available are
              retrieved and upgraded; under no circumstances are  cur-
              rently  installed  packages  removed,  or  packages  not
              already installed retrieved and installed. New  versions
              of  currently installed packages that cannot be upgraded
              without changing the install status of  another  package
              will be left at their current version. An update must be
              performed first so that apt-get knows that new  versions
              of packages are available.

Repeated runs of 'apt-get upgrade' should be no more effective than a
single run.

Here's the documentation of 'dist-upgrade'.

       dist-upgrade
              dist-upgrade,  in addition to performing the function of
              upgrade, also intelligently handles  changing  dependen-
              cies  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.      The
              /etc/apt/sources.list  file contains a list of locations
              from which to retrieve desired package files.  See  also
              apt_preferences(5)  for  a  mechanism for overriding the
              general settings for individual packages.

The problems you're having with dist-upgrade are probably because
certain packages have had to be forced into testing a little earlier
than normally possible in order to overcome roadblocks in development.
The problems caused by this are slated to be resolved gradually as we
move towards the next release.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]