[Gllug] Aptitude

[Matthew King]

Paul Cupis <paul at cupis.co.uk> writes:

> Peter Grandi wrote:
>> That's a rather dangerous thing to do. 'dist-upgrade' is well
>> defined, global 'upgrade' is a much fuzzier concept.
>
> Rubbish:

Well not quite, although it's true that the concept isn't fuzzy.

apt-get(8) would be a good read as it actually contains a description of
what dist-upgrade does (and because, naturally, apt-get's better than
aptitude :-).

>   upgrade
>           ...
>           If a package cannot be upgraded without violating these
>           constraints, it will be kept at its current version.

This is the important point. If you are performing a major upgrade (or,
when following testing/unstable, package dependencies change) the
upgrade has a good chance of not upgrading a lot of packages it should,
thus leaving your system in some sort of hybrid.

Naturally, this being Debian, it'll be a working hybrid, although for
varying definitions of 'working'.

>> 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.
>
> No, but it should be known at the time of running the command. "upgrade"
> is much safer than "dist-upgrade" if you are not really paying
> attention, and you can always set your source.list file to refer to the
> distribution/version by codename rather than by stable/testing/unstable.

If you're not paying attention to a system upgrade, however minor and in
whichever OS/distribution, then you deserve whatever mess you get in.

Matthew

-- 
I must take issue with the term "a mere child," for it has been my
invariable experience that the company of a mere child is infinitely
preferable to that of a mere adult.
                                           --  Fran Lebowitz
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