[NBLUG/talk] Debian upgrade

[Kyle Rankin]

On Wed, Mar 22, 2006 at 09:44:51AM -0800, Troy Arnold wrote:
> 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 
> 

Oh I meant for Unstable as well (I use unstable on my primary desktop too).
It's true that sometimes you'll get a large group of held back packages,
but usually if I apt-get install one of the "base" ones in the group, I
find that a large number of them are waiting on the same new dependency.

A lot of the reports you hear from people about Unstable breaking are due
to dist-upgrades.

-- 
Kyle Rankin
NBLUG President
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org
IRC: greenfly at irc.freenode.net #nblug 
kyle at nblug.org