[NBLUG/talk] apt-get question

[troy]

On Fri, May 09, 2003 at 10:45:24AM -0700, Robert Hayes wrote:
> I installed Knoppix on my hard drive, and have the video and net running now.
> Knoppix doesn't come with the full gnome environment installed, and I'd like 
> that.
> It is also installed as a testing/unstable release.
> 
> Do I have this right? All I have to do to update (upgrade) my running system 
> is change the line in /etc/apt/apt.conf from
> 
> APT::Default-Release "testing";
>
> to "stable"

I haven't played with knoppix much, but I believe it contains some
packages from the 'experimental' branch.  If so, then even changing the
default release even to 'unstable' would possibly result in some package
downgrades.  But certainly, if you use 'stable' you'd see almost every
package on your system removed and replaced with the much older ones
from stable.  So, instead of that nice kde 3.1, you'd get kde 2 and
gnome 1.4.  Uhhm, unless you go to apt-get.org and hunt down the
backports for those packages.

> Can it possibly be that easy?

Yeah, if the sources in /etc/apt/sources.list agree.
Well, it's that easy to completely upgrade / downgrade your entire
systems packages, but you'd still have to answer a bunch of questions
about the installed config files.

Default-Releasing to 'stable' is almost certainly not going to give you
what you want.  You *might* be able to get away with 'testing' but
probably 'unstable' would be a better bet for keeping your system close
to its current state.  

Unstable isn't really all that unstable.  Usually the worse thing that
happens is that packages become uninstallable for a time.  You'll
usually get a warning if you subscribe to the very low-traffic (2-3
msgs/week) debian-devel-announce mailing list.  

Things can and do go wrong with unstable, so just don't do an upgrade
right before you have important work to do.  Problems that do come up
are generally fixed quickly, with more important packgages fixed or a
work-around posted within a day or so.

But basically, if the system works it will stay working unless an
'apt-get upgrade' installs something broken.

> Then I just run dselect?  How is apt-upgrade different from the "Update" 
> feature in dselect?

I'm sorry -- can't help you there.  I'm a relative Debian newbie, so I
was weaned on Aptitude and apt-get.

-troy