On Fri, 19 Jun 2015 11:26:49 Craig Sanders said, On Fri, Jun 19, 2015 at 04:39:26AM +1000, zlinw@mcmedia.com.au wrote:
and _____BEFORE______ doing any dist-upgrade I ALWAYS check what will happen using dselect as unlike aptitude it will display every change that will be done.
that's what 'apt-get -d -u dist-upgrade' is for. it not only limits
Thanks for the tip, I will give it a go, for various reasons though I prefer dselect.
IMPORTANT point here apt and dselect use different package lists both these need to be updated separately to keep the system in sync.
please stop saying this because it's not true.
apt-get, aptitude, dselect, dpkg and even the GUI versions of same *ALL* >use /var/lib/dpkg/status and /var/lib/dpkg/available.
I beg to differ here, on my systems apt-get update does ___not___ touch /var/lib/dpkg/status and /var/lib/dpkg/available. Also after such an update dselect does ___not___ show any change, but after doing "dselect update", the /var/lib/dpkg/available but status remains as it was.
Russell Coker said,
I've had ongoing problems with aptitude insisting on removing things I want.
I have checked this out and apt appears not te be aware of some packages. as previously stated in one of my cases "blender", apt wanted to remove it due to two missing dependencies, both packages were installed and dselect was aware of them apt was not.
if this actually happened as you remember it,then it was most likely due to versioned dependencies. a dependency can be declared not just on a package
The version numbers ___were___ correct, I checked this explicitly, for some reason apt simply ignored this while dselect and dpkg did not. From all of the above I have assumed apt and dselect ___do___ use different package and status lists. One thing I will restate is because of ___VERY___ poor and expensive internet up around this neck of the woods, I always do a cd (now dvd) install. Long experience shows that for some reason debians net upgrade does ___________NOT___________ like this and after a handfull of net updates the package system gets itself into a real twist. I have found keeping the apt and dselect package list in sync reduces but does not eliminate this confusion. Note: You can fix this usually with dpkg, it takes days though. After 3 or 4 updates its necesary to reinstall the system, with apt-move this is not as difficult as it may appear. I always keep my own updated repository for all versions of debian I use, these only containing the packages I require. To reinstall one uses the method in the debian docs to copy a system, uisng this it only takes 30 minutes or so to reinstall. Remember I am no newbe, I have been using linux since kernel 0.96d (earlish 1993) and having been using debian (the best linux distro) since debians very begining. Lindsay