On 13/05/07, Ira Abramov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Quoting Omer Zak, from the post of Sat, 12 May:
> I have at last upgraded my desktop PC from Debian Sarge to Debian Etch.
> At one stage, the aptitude package was removed. But I used dselect to
> re-install it and so could proceed with installation.
>
> Moral: avoid marking packages as automatic in aptitude, unless you
> really need them only when another package is installed.
well actually I haven't ran dselect in years... I would run "apt-get
install aptitude".
I don't think you mark packages as auto, it's more like aptitude marks
them "auto" by default if you never selected them. What you want to do
is once you selected a package and it auto-added a few more "automatic"
packages, go over the list and force select them if you want them to
stay regardless of the package that added them.
Actually my strategy is sort of the other way around - I try to keep as many
packages as I can marked as "auto" unless I'm absolutely sure I really need
them independent of other packages (e.g. perl modules, or development libs).
That way I know my system doesn't have too much lint left behind from
"search and learn" expeditions through the vast fields of "apt-cache
search...". (I also use "purge" instead of plain "remove" to keep the lint
down).
Another couple of morals I'd like to add from Omer's story:
1. Carefully and patiently go through the first screen you see after hitting
"g" ("go") in aptitude and make sure you like what you see, so you'll catch
any nasty surprises before they actually happen.
2. When upgrading between major releases, I've seen many times
recommendations to upgrade the administration tools (apt, dpkg, aptitude)
first on a round of their own, since the new version usually have many bug
fixes and important features to handle the upgrade better then the version
which exists in the older release. These will usually also drag a bunch of
other basic packages they depend on but hopefully you'll get the newer,
smarter version handling depenencides for most of your package's upgrade.
Cheers,
--Amos
