Re: what does "kept back" mean when do "apt-get upgrade"?

[Mark McCorkell <markmccorkell@tiscali.co.uk>]

On Tue, 2009-04-14 at 09:07 +0800, 明覺 wrote:

> if i do the dist-upgrade or full-upgrade to force upgrade these
> packages, then i may break the dependency of some other packages,
> which depend on the old versions, right? thanks.

My understanding is that it won't break dependencies, only install those
that may be missing from your system.

For example:

foo-1.0 is installed on your system. It has no dependencies.

foo-1.1 is released which depends on libbar-1.1.

If you already have libbar-1.1 installed, "apt-get upgrade" will upgrade
to foo-1.1

If you don't have libbar-1.1 installed, "apt-get upgrade" will 'keep
back' foo-1.1, whereas "apt-get dist-upgrade" will update to foo-1.1 AND
install libbar-1.1.

The caution comes in that sometimes dist-upgrade will remove packages
too, but even then it generally gets it right.


-- 
Mark McCorkell <markmccorkell@tiscali.co.uk>