[NBLUG/talk] Debian upgrade

Kyle Rankin kyle at nblug.org
Wed Mar 22 07:42:49 PST 2006


On Tue, Mar 21, 2006 at 04:46:07PM -0800, William Tracy wrote:
> Well, yesterday I had a close call with Debian. Debian has one
> drawback: It's like having a bomb in the middle of your house with a
> big red button on the side labeled "apt-get dist-upgrade". ;-)
> 
[snip]
> Thanks,
> William Tracy
> 

A good cautionary tale about the dangers of dist-upgrade. For those of you
who do run Debian, despite what you may have heard, DON'T use apt-get
dist-upgrade to upgrade. Use apt-get upgrade. Sometimes when packages are
in transition APT will hold them back. Some reasons include a package which
requires some other packages at a particular version, but those packages
haven't been released yet. Another reason might be that a package is going
to remove an old dependency once it is upgraded.

In any case, I recommend NEVER using dist-upgrade unless you use it for its
intended purpose--to switch between distributions of Debian (ie to switch
from woody to sarge to etch to sid). Once you are at a particular
distribution, use apt-get upgrade to upgrade packages. Yes some times a few
packages will be held back--that's a good thing! What I typically do when I
notice a package has been held back is to let it sit there for a few days
in that state in case it is waiting on another package, and if it still is
held back, I do a manual apt-get install <packagename>. That will start the
process of installing that particular package and inform me of any changes
it might make (such as removing an old dependency, installing a new, etc.)
and I can see from that whether I want to proceed.

Even better, if you use this method, if someone /does/ break afterwards you
have a much better chance of tracking down the cause since it will be
within the scope of only a few packages you have upgraded instead of 50.

-- 
Kyle Rankin
NBLUG President
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org
IRC: greenfly at irc.freenode.net #nblug 
kyle at nblug.org



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