Re: Aptitude - Removing Unwanted Holds
On Mon, Dec 04, 2006 at 14:33:14 -0800, Arlie Stephens wrote:
[...]
> Aha. That would be the problem - not knowing the difefrence between
> upgrade and dist-upgrade.
>
> What I don't understand is when 'upgrade' would ever be useful. It
> seems as if an awful lot of apps are, efefctively, released as
> multiple packages, and an upgrade to one almost almost necessitates
> upgrades of all its friends. An example would be the various bits of
> kde. What I think I'm seeing is that if a set of new versions are
> interdependent, upgrade won't touch them, even if all the various
> pieces are already on my system in their prior versions.
Restricting yourself to "upgrade" can be useful if a set of
interdependent packages undergoes a major update. One example was the
KDE 3.3 -> 3.4 upgrade which coincided with the transition to gcc 4.0.
This meant that some very important libraries had to be upgraded.
Upgrading one of these libraries required the removal of all programs
which depended on that library and were not available in the new version
yet. In such a situation "dist-upgrade" can be nasty if apt-get/aptitude
decides that being able to upgrade 90 packages is worth sacrificing 10
other packages. "upgrade" on the other hand was perfectly safe during
that time and allowed you to keep your non-KDE packages up-to-date.
"upgrade" does everything which does not require removal of packages or
installation of new upgrades. You should not confuse it with 'u'
(lowercase) in the interactive mode of aptitude, which is the equivalent
to 'aptitude update' on the command line. (My other mail was maybe a bit
unclear; I meant that 'u' in combination with the manual upgrading that
you described corresponds to 'aptitude upgrade', not 'u' alone.)
--
Regards,
Florian
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