Derek,
I checked my notes and the way I figured out to make sure I had the binaries when they are available was to use the following:
date; nice fink scanpackages; nice fink index; nice apt-get update; nice apt-get dist-upgrade; nice fink index; nice fink selfupdate; nice fink update-all; nice fink scanpackages; nice fink list -i; date
I cut and paste this as one line into my command prompt.
Now, this is after issuing the su command so that I don't have to be present when apt-get asks for a password (in other words, I'm logged in as root). To break down what this does, let me first say that I know that some of these command are superfluous, but I don't believe they should ever create problems. Also, the 'nice' sets those commands to run in the background in case you need to be doing something else while fink is crunching away.
So, by the numbers, my meager understanding is this:
date: tells me when the processes began
fink scanpackages: checks for binaries available locally
fink index: a safety check
apt-get update: tells apt what binaries are available on the remote machine
apt-get dist-upgrade: installs updated binaries and their dependencies (apt-get upgrade will not install updated binaries if they require new files, so I wouldn't use that)
fink index: tells fink what apt got
fink selfupdate: installs a new package manager if available
fink update-all: installs updated files that must be built from source
fink scanpackages: tells fink what dpkg did
fink list -i: tells me what I have installed
date: tells me when the processes ended
One thing you might do would be to add a 'fink --version' command before and after to see if there were changes made to the package manager, or you might add a 'printenv' command for debugging purposes later.
At any rate, I pretty much use that command string whenever I update and it never causes problems. I have two machines, one with unstable activated and the other without. The command string works fine on both machines.
Good luck, Robert
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