On Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 09:01:23PM -0800, Marc Shapiro wrote:
Having seen a number of questions lately responded to by directing the
OP to backports, I decided to look into it, myself. I added backports
to my sources.list, did an update and dist-upgrade. I said 'no' to the
actual update so that I could look it over before committing myself to
it. From what I can see, I will probably just remove backports from my
sources.list.
From apt-get -u dist-upgrade:
94 upgraded, 59 newly installed, 8 to remove and 2 not upgraded
The packages to be deleted are:
mysql-client-4.1 mysql-common-4.1 mysql-server-4.1 openoffice.org-bin
openoffice.org-debian-files openoffice.org-debian-menus
openoffice.org-help-en openoffice.org-l10n-en
Now, I don't care about deleted packages as long as the equivalent is
being brought in with other packages, however, I only see 2 mysql
packages being installed:
mysql-client-5.0 mysql-common
neither of which provides mysql-server.
Also, the only openoffice files being added are:
openoffice.org-common openoffice.org-core openoffice.org-java-common
openoffice.org-l10n-en-us
Of these files:
oo.o-common replaces oo.o-debian-files
oo.o-core replace oo.o-bin
oo.o-l10n-en-us replaces oo.o-l10n-en
oo.o-common-java is new
While the help for 1.1.3 is removed, no help is installed for 2.0
Nothing replaces, or conflicts with openoffice.org-debian-files (that I
can see), yet it is being removed. I'm not surprised that it is not
mentioned (in apt-cache show) for any of the packages to be installed,
since it was from the package that I dl'd directly from
www.openoffice.org that I used to install v 2.0 previously. IOW it is
not from a Debian package, at all.
So, as near as I can tell, doing this dist-upgrade whould leave me
without a mysql server, will remove my help for oo.o 1.1 while not
providing any for oo.o 2.0 and will break the version 2.0 of oo.o that I
currently have installed.
Is this correct, or am I missing something here?
The idea of the backports is not that you use them as a regular package
repository for keeping your system up to date, but that you bring in
certain packages that you know you want that aren't in stable. Say you
are working on a web server and the new content system needs php5. You
can use the backports packages to migrate (carefully) to php5. I would
not recommend using it as a generic upgrade system.
The mysql issues you saw were because backports provides mysql-common in
the 5.0 range, which replaces the 4.1. This requires removing all the
4.1 mysql packages since they depend on that, but won't cause the 5.0
mysql packages to automatically be installed.
My recommendation is to keep backports in your sources.list file, but
add the following to /etc/apt/preferences:
Package: *
Pin: release a=sarge-backports
Pin-Priority: 200
This will keep all the packages in the backports repository at a lower
priority (200) than the main sarge repositories (500). After that you
can carefully install whichever backported packages you want to use.
Sometimes that may involve manually tracking down issues. For example
to upgrade mysql to 5.0 you now need to override the package priority on
mysql-common to install the 5.0 version or the other mysql 5 packages
will be broken. Using aptitude in curses mode makes this pretty easy.
Once again I would not recommend blinding pullingin packages from
backports, and certainly not trying to dist-upgrade from it.
--
Steve Block
http://ev-15.com/
http://steveblock.com/
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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