LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Richard Russell <richard@yellowgoanna.com>
  To  : David Fitch <davidf@parachilna.com>
        Brian Marr <cabernet@ihug.com.au>
  Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2003 00:44:10 +0930

RE: Apt-get upgrade

Hmm.. this reply got left behind... I'll send it now anyway...

> Brian Marr wrote:
> > Do people recommend using apt-get upgrade regularly or am I
> asking for
> > trouble ? I make regular use of apt-get update and also upgrade
> > individual packages, but am wary of making a problem for 
> myself with
> > regular upgrades as it may ring in big changes to my
> system. What do
> > other people do?

David Fitch replied:

> do it.  I regularly do it on woody and testing (sarge) boxes.

Likewise... I've never had a problem with it -- certainly with an apt-get
update, you won't blat your config files, and no config format changes occur
(no real version changes occur either)... Basically, if you have
security.debian.org in your sources.list, you'll get security updates, and
that's about it.

> I also use "apt-get dist-upgrade" rather than just "upgrade"
> I forget why exactly, something about "upgrade" won't upgrade 
> certain packages in certain situations.  Make sure your 
> /etc/apt/sources.list file doesn't have multiple versions in 
> it though if you use "dist-upgrade".

       dist-upgrade
              dist-upgrade, in addition to performing  the  func-
              tion  of upgrade, also intelligently handles chang-
              ing dependencies with  new  versions  of  packages;
              apt-get  has  a "smart" conflict resolution system,
              and it will attempt to upgrade the  most  important
              packages  at  the expense of less important ones if
              necessary.  The /etc/apt/sources.list file contains
              a  list of locations from which to retrieve desired
              package files.


This is only neccessary when changing releases (eg from woody to sarge). The
reason is because a Debian distribution doesn't change software versions
(and hence dependencies) after it's released. Every peice of software
presently in woody (Debian 3.0) is the same version as was in there when it
was first released (or frozen). The only changes are security and bug fixes,
which, when they are upstream changes, tend to be backported to the current
version.

rr

-- 
Richard Russell
Yellow Goanna P/L
m: +61 412 827 805
e: richard@yellowgoanna.com
w: http://www.yellowgoanna.com

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