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Re: apt-get dist-upgrade wants to wipe out everythin!



Lee Braiden wrote:

On Friday 11 March 2005 19:48, David A. Cobb wrote:
The next thing, 'dist-upgrade' prepares for:
"2 upgraded, 6 newly installed, 76 downgraded, 5626 to remove and 0 not
upgraded."
I'm glad apt at least says it is about to do something really stupid and
am I positive that's what I want?

apt is doing what you tell it to do. Use apt-get upgrade, not dist-upgrade. dist-upgrade is for rare occasions when you want to make big changes, such as upgrading a major set of packages to a new version (as opposed to a new revision), and to uninstall any old software that the new version no longer requires, etc.
Ah. I think I found something, anyway. Pointing at the differences between upgrade and dist-upgrade,
I went looking for where my "preferred" distribution was specified.

In /etc/apt/preferences, I found
Package: *
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-priority: 1001

Package: *
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-priority: 999
,,, ,,,

It seems to say it places a higher priority to 'pin' things at 'stable' than at 'testing'. However, virtually everything on my box is 'sarge == testing'. I deleted the stanza pinning anything at 'stable', and -- voila! PS. Just changeing to "upgrade" didn't really help -- it just cured the desire to do something drastically stupid. Apt still wanted to roll back hundreds of packages to an older revision. Now, I think I see why.

As usual, and as we always taught young programmers, the damn things always to what you tell them to do -- NOT what you want them to do.


--
David A. Cobb, Software Engineer, Public Access Advocate
"By God's Grace, I am a Christian man; by my actions a great sinner." -- The Way of a Pilgrim: R.French, Tr.
Life is too short to tolerate crappy software!





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