[NBLUG/talk] apt-get repositories

[Dave Sisley]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 12:03:56PM -0700, Eric Eisenhart wrote:
> 
> > As a follow-up question:  What's the best way to find out the purpose of some 
> > of the less obvious packages in my list?
> > 
> > When I run apt-get it offers up a long list of things that it thinks should 
> > be upgraded, but I don't know what most of them do.  I suspect I don't a lot 
> > of them, and I would like to remove them (but I am scared!).  
> 
> apt-cache.
> 
> Namely: "apt-cache show <packagename>".  But you probably want to also know
> to use "apt-cache search <keyword>" to search for things you didn't know
> about.
> 
> If you think you don't need something, do an "apt-cache show", then see what
> "apt-get remove" says and run "apt-cache show" on any other packages that it
> wants to remove.

Thanks for the info, Eric.  I gave it a whirl -- I have so much to learn!

I have another question, of course.  Running 'apt-cache show gaim', I
get info on *both* versions:  .59 and .66.  Does this mean that both are
present, or will apt sort this out next time I use it to upgrade gaim.
I moved up to .66 by just downloading the rpm from sourceforge and
installing it through rpm, not apt-get.

-- dave.