Re: What will happens when sarge becomes stable?
On Thu, Dec 16, 2004 at 11:52:51AM +0100, Maurits van Rees wrote:
> Why don't you do `apt-get upgrade'? I am under the impression that
> `apt-get dist-upgrade' is only meant to be used when you are switching
> from one distribution to another, e.g. from woody to sarge.
`apt-get upgrade` upgrades all packages which do not have any other
dependencies. `apt-get dist-upgrade` upgrades all packages AND
downloads any new packages that are dependent.
For example, you have foo 1.0 installed, and do an `apt-get update` and
discover that foo 1.1 is installed. Now, however, foo 1.1 requires
libfoo 1.0. If you `apt-get upgrade`, foo will not be upgraded, but
'held back' because it cannot successfully install without the new
installation of libfoo 1.0. If you run `apt-get dist-upgrade` foo will
be upgraded and libfoo will be newly installed.
Short answer: dist-upgrade will install new packages when required,
upgrade only upgrades the package itself.
As new releases come out, packages will be split, new packages come out,
etc, so dist-upgrade would definately be the way to go.
> Also, you do an automatic update at night and a manual upgrade in the
> morning. I wonder if things can go (slightly) wrong because of the
> time span in between. Some packages may have gotten a new version in
> the meantime. An upgrade would then be requesting a package that is no
> longer on the server. I would always do an update just before doing
> the actual upgrade. In the stable branch there aren't many updates
> anyway, so it won't take long.
I used cron-apt for a while, but I didn't like how it worked, so I wrote
my own little bash script for auto updates. I have a custom cronjob that
runs nightly and downloads the latest package updates, and also
downloads the new packages if there is any. If there are packages to
install and there are packages that are new since yesterday, then I get
an email.
If anyone is interested, I can post my script here or on my website.
There's a pretty good article in this month's Linux Journal on this
topic, though the author didn't go into a ton of detail on
Debian-specific stuff.
Jeremy
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