[NBLUG/talk] apt-get question

[Robert Hayes]

Thank you, Troy.
I misunderstood the relationship between apt and dselect.
I thought they were both necessary for a process to complete.
I made partimage backups of the installation and began playing with apt-get.
It's magic. It just works. I can't believe I let it take me so long to move 
to Debian.
Thanks again.

On Saturday 10 May 2003 01:22 am, you wrote:
> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at nblug.org
> http://nblug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk