[vox-tech] Installing subversion from sid into a sarge box

[Peter Jay Salzman]

On Wed 05 Jan 05, 11:37 AM, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> said:
> Quoting Chris Jenks (jenks at resonance.org):
> 
> >   I've been wondering - when Woody is replaced by Sarge, will those 
> > following the stable track have to apt-get dist-upgrade, rather than 
> > apt-get upgrade, on release day?
> 
> Er, this will seem lame, but I'm not sure.  I personally always do
> "dist-upgrade".
> 
> The difference between the two is pretty subtle:  I vaguely recall that
> dist-upgrade does more intensive handling of dependencies, and is more
> likely to implicitly introduce new packages you didn't specifically ask
> for by name.  When I was brand-new to all this, the dist-upgrade
> treatment struck me as better on balance, and so I've always used it
> instead of "upgrade".

Rick, as I understand it, an "upgrade" will refuse to upgrade a package if
its dependencies aren't already on the system.  "dist-upgrade" upgrades a
package, whether the dependencies are already installed/configured/setup or
not.  (Again, this is my understanding.  The man page for apt-get is
impressively vague).

Real world example:

I hope to become a Debian maintainer sometime this century, and am taking
over the "yadex" package.  Yadex used to come with a second binary called
ybsp, which was required for Yadex.

The author of Yadex realized that ybsp was hackish and there was a MUCH
better alternative to ybsp, maintained at sourceforge, called "bsp".  So he
removed ybsp from Yadex and tells Yadex users to get bsp because ybsp is no
longer being provided.

On the Debian side, I packaged the most recent version of Yadex, that no
longer comes with ybsp.

I also created a brand new package, bsp.  Since Yadex *requires* a node
builder in order to do anything useful, bsp is listed as a required package
for Yadex.

A Yadex user on Debian who does:

   apt-get upgrade

will see that the yadex package is "on hold" because it has a dependency
that isn't currently on the system (bsp can't be on the system because it's
brand new to Debian).  An apt-get install will bring the package plus all
its dependencies in.  But an upgrade will refuse unless the dependencies are
all present.  To upgrade yadex, the user has to use:

   apt-get dist-upgrade

and apt-get will first install the new bsp package, and then upgrade the
yadex package. 

At least, this is my understanding.


> By the way, consider doing "aptitude upgrade" (or aptitude dist-upgrade)
> rather than using apt-get directly.  Joey Hess has made an excellent
> case for why.  See:  "Aptitude" on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Debian/ 
 
Mon dieu!  La mort a apt-get!  Vive la aptitude!

This should be _required_ reading.  I had no idea aptitude was so cool.  I
used to use it a long time ago, but it was taken out of Debian for awhile
and I forgot about it.

I even have a favorite quote from that page:

   "If you're a dselect user, learning curve is obviously not one
    of your problems."

Pete

-- 
The mathematics of physics has become ever more abstract, rather than more
complicated.  The mind of God appears to be abstract but not complicated.
He also appears to like group theory.  --  Tony Zee's "Fearful Symmetry"

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