[Gllug] Aptitude

[Peter Grandi]

>>> On Tue, 13 Sep 2005 11:47:57 +0100, Jack Bertram
>>> <jack at jbertram.net> said:

jack> Why would running "aptitude upgrade"

That's a rather dangerous thing to do. 'dist-upgrade' is well
defined, global 'upgrade' is a much fuzzier concept.

Also, 'dist-upgrade' to a specifically named edition (eg
'sarge') is rather safer than to a state (e.g. 'stable'),
because the association between editions and states is not
immutable.

jack> from the commandline and running aptitude interactively,
jack> then pressing "g", do different things? [ ... ]

Perhaps because by default in interactive mode 'aptitude' also
adds recommended packages to the installation -- but not sure
about this. If you configure 'aptitude' conservatively (which is
not quite the default) the behaviour should be the same.

I suppose that the reason why the interactive defaults are less
conservative is that when you press 'g' you are given the chance
to review (and backout) the requested actions package by
package, category by category.

jack> Running Debian stable - I think I was on woody, then got
jack> bitten by the upgrade, but not quite sure.

Uhm, «I think I was on woody» is a somewhat dangerous frame of
mind.

I would suggest making sure which Debian edition you want to
have installed ('woody' or 'sarge', and I would strongly suggest
'sarge' instead of 'woody'); also make sure all the paths in
'/etc/apt/sources.list' mention exlicit edition names (eg
'woody', 'sarge', 'etch', 'sid' currently) instead of states,
and you have edition pinning in '/etc/apt/apt.conf' with

  APT::Default-Release "sarge";

or similar. There are a few sample configs with URLs to
explanations about pinning etc. here:

  http://WWW.sabi.co.UK/Cfg/APT/

It is also my preference to disable automatic broken dependency
fixing, because this can result is rather extensive changes if
one tries an excessively daring upgrade.

Final warning: the APT system is designed to work automagically
if all your packages are from the same edition, and somewhat
helpful but risky if they are to be taken from two (stable, like
'woody' and 'sarge') editions; it takes some real understanding
of things like ABIs, ABI transitions, dependencies etc. to do
things right if you are taking packages from more editions and
these include the 'testing' edition (currently 'etch') and the
'unstable' state.

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