On Friday 24 February 2006 11:51, Chris Lale wrote: > Hal Vaughan wrote: [snip] > > A couple of thoughts come to mind. I don't kow if they will help you. > > > > 1. Use > > > > aptitude update && aptitude dist-upgrade > > > > instead of aptitude update && aptitude upgrade. This will deal > > intelligently with dependendies. > > My understanding (and what the man page says) that dist-upgrade is more > aggressive. Is that wrong? > upgrade will only install newer versions of packages. If package foo changes its dependencies from bar to barc2a (for a C++ ABI transition, for example), then upgrade will not attempt to upgrade package foo. Dist-upgrade is allowed to install new packages and remove old (hopefully only obsolete) ones. So dist-upgrade will upgrade foo, install barc2a, and remove bar.
> > 2. I have always found apt-get totally reliable during upgrade. I > > have had a couple of frights using Synaptic or Aptitude for upgrades. > > I was using apt, but I've heard that the "official" and preferred way is > aptitude and that they handle some issues differently, so the point is > to pick one and stick with it. Is this still the case? Aptitude and apt-get do indeed handle dependencies differently. Well, they have a different set of logic to try to resolve dependencies. Sometimes that leads to different results, sometimes that leads to more pain doing a specific circular upgrade with one versus the other. People's experiences and impressions vary wildly. Hope that helps, Justin
