[NBLUG/talk] Debian upgrade

Troy Arnold troy at zenux.net
Wed Mar 22 09:44:51 PST 2006


On Wed, Mar 22, 2006 at 07:42:49AM -0800, Kyle Rankin wrote:
> 
> A good cautionary tale about the dangers of dist-upgrade. For those of you
> who do run Debian, despite what you may have heard, DON'T use apt-get
> dist-upgrade to upgrade. Use apt-get upgrade. Sometimes when packages are
> in transition APT will hold them back. Some reasons include a package which
> requires some other packages at a particular version, but those packages
> haven't been released yet. Another reason might be that a package is going
> to remove an old dependency once it is upgraded.

Actually, that's not good advice for Unstable users.  In Unstable, package
dependencies sometimes move around like mad in the process of getting
reading for Testing.  So, if you're running Unstable, you are best off
using dist-upgrade as your standard upgrade method.  You're much less
likely to end up with a situation that requires manual dependency
twiddling.

Kyle's advice is good for Stable users, and /most of the time/ for Testing
users.

(Kyle and Eric give me crap for running Unstable on my primary desktop, but
they're wimps ;) )

-troy 




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