Bug#53152: apt: incremental upgrade (is needed!)

[debian@Tonelli.sns.it]

Package: apt
Version: 0.3.15
Severity: wishlist

I saw that bug 46639 was closed; but , there was a request in it
that shouldnt go unanswered

as Chris Lawrence <quango@watervalley.net>
wrote in bug 46639,

>>says Chris Lawrence <quango@watervalley.net>:
> Also, it would be nice if apt could handle the situation in which you
> want to do a {dselect,dist}-upgrade but can't cache all the needed
> debs, by upgrading maximal subsets of packages.  

I would say that this problem is quite nastier than may seem:
indeed, I suspect that the problem will show up to almost every Debian user.
Why? well...
Consider the average guy who is using Debian; s/he has a HD with size
some size (lets say, something from 150Mb to 6Gb ); since there is no
point in leaving free disk space, you can bet that the disk
is full more than 50% of nice Debian packages.
When s/he tries to upgrade, the new packages will not fit ,
all together, in the hard disk (no way...).

Now, the best point in using apt is "seamlessly installing packages
 or upgrading to new distributions" . :-(


what else?

>>says Chris Lawrence <quango@watervalley.net>:
> I realize the
> algorithm for doing so is probably hideously complex (I can't map it
> out in my head), but it would be a very useful feature for "small"
> machines with little disk space.

well, when upgrading to slink, I
used a nice trick that (almost) did it: I simply listed the set of 
packages that had to be upgraded (by using  apt-get -s dist-upgrade )
and then I installed them one by one (cleaning the cache every time)
using  apt-get install
!!!!
for any one of them, apt-get  simply decided a minimal set of packages
to download and install (I had problems only when installing the new X).

thanks for your attention!

a.m.



-- System Information
Debian Release: potato
Kernel Version: Linux Tonelli 2.2.13 #1 Sat Nov 20 12:44:19 EST 1999 i586 unknown

Versions of the packages apt depends on:
ii  libc6           2.1.2-5        GNU C Library: Shared libraries and timezone
ii  libstdc++2.10   2.95.2-3       The GNU stdc++ library