[NBLUG/talk] apt-get repositories

[Eric Eisenhart]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 11:51:21AM -0700, Dave Sisley wrote:
> I'm not looking for anything specific, really.  This kind of started when I 
> found out that there was a new version of gaim (.66) and I thought I'd 
> upgrade.  I was surprised that freshrpms didn't have a new version than mine (.64).  

I think freshrpms may've stopped updating the RH8 packages.  Or at least be
updating them less frequently.  Freshrpms carries 0.66 for RH9; RH8 came
with 0.59.8, and that's actually a huge jump.

> As a follow-up question:  What's the best way to find out the purpose of some 
> of the less obvious packages in my list?
> 
> When I run apt-get it offers up a long list of things that it thinks should 
> be upgraded, but I don't know what most of them do.  I suspect I don't a lot 
> of them, and I would like to remove them (but I am scared!).  

apt-cache.

Namely: "apt-cache show <packagename>".  But you probably want to also know
to use "apt-cache search <keyword>" to search for things you didn't know
about.

If you think you don't need something, do an "apt-cache show", then see what
"apt-get remove" says and run "apt-cache show" on any other packages that it
wants to remove.
-- 
Eric Eisenhart
NBLUG Co-Founder & Vice-President Pro Tempore
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org/
eric at nblug.org, IRC: Freiheit at freenode, AIM: falschfreiheit, ICQ: 48217244