Re: aptitude safe-upgrade vs apt-get upgrade.
Hi,
On Mon, 26 Oct 2020 11:58:18 -0500
"R. Ramesh" <rramesh@verizon.net> wrote:
(...)
> I have these exact lines in my sources.list also. I thought we have
> backports so that we can get the newer version of packages. For
> example, buster multimedia has mythtv 0.30 and backports has mythtv
> 0.31 (the last time I checked). I have installed 0.31 in my system
> (using -t stable-backports, I think) as my frontend need to be
> compatible with backend that runs mythtv 0.31 (on xubuntu 20.04). In
> that case, would the above pinning rule prevent proper upgrade as it
> puts backports at a lower priority? (I assume that is what your pinning
> rules imply unless priorities are increased with lower numerical value)
>
> In other words, should I stick to aptitude's decision?
>
> Why priority 331 and 332? Why not some other two with same
> relationship? Sorry, if I asked a simple question. I will be more than
> happy to read documentation, if I will find it there.
these values are somewhat arbitraryly chosen. The point is that they
have to be values smaller than 500 and greater than 100 and that the
value for the deb-multimedia backports needs to be smaller than that of
the regular deb-multimedia repo.
This is because 500 is the default priority of any repo defined in
sources.list; if two or more packages from different repos share this
same priority, the package with the newest version number will be
installed; usually when using stable with deb-multimedia this is the
deb-multimedia (backports) package. If priorities differ, the package with
the highest priority will be installed, unless the lower priority package
is explicitely requested by the user.
So, if you don't pin down the priority of deb-multimedia, virtually every
audio- and video-related package on your system will be replaced with the
deb-multimedia version, which for the sake of stability is very likely a
bad idea.
So it is safer to lower the priority of deb-multimedia and that of
deb-multimedia backports even a bit more, so that the official debian
packages remain the default, deb-multimedia packages the first
alternative if you actually want/need a newer version or a version with
some extra features and deb-multimedia backports the last choice if you
really, really need that version.
But please beware: blindly installing too many of these can easily mess
with apt's dependencies and cause nasty situations ("dependency hell")
> In other words, should I stick to aptitude's decision?
I really recommend to do the pinning first, then re-run
$ apt update
and then look again what is suggested when you call apt-get upgrade or
aptitude safe-upgrade.
I have a hunch that probably there won't be much to upgrade anymore.
And as someone else pointed out, apt-get upgrade will not always install
the latest kernel and possibly other things you would want to keep up to
date, so you might wnat to consider to just use apt-get dist-upgrade
instead, which in my experience with a properly configured debian stable
system should not cause any problems.
Regards
Michael
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