Re: Etch status..?

Douglas Tutty wrote:
On Fri, Dec 01, 2006 at 12:50:58AM -0500, cga2000 wrote:
Sounds like I'll have to start over and stick to one or the other.
No, just start using aptitude, stop using apt-get, and go manually
through the list of packages from within aptitude, determine if they're
ones you want, they depend on packages installed, or they're cruft.
The big difference with aptitude is that it remembers which packages you explicitly requested. And it cleans up packages that are no longer needed bases on this knowledge. So if you installed something without
aptitude it may decide that it's not needed any more and decide to delete it. Therefore, use apritude interactively and *always* look through the packages it proposes to delete. If you want one of them, it's very easy to stop the deletion -- just explicitly requset it!

Otherwise, aptitude uses the same underlying package management tools as apt-get.
Guess I'll have to learn that aptitude full-screen interface.

root's bash history tells me that this is what I did after a sarge
netinst where I manually requested that no packages be installed on top
of the base system:

1. apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade
2. edit /etc/apt/sources.list to point to testing
4. apt-get dist-upgrade
5. aptitude install screen less xserver-xorg xfonts-base wmaker conky
xterm elinks cdrecord vim ..

Is there a risk that at some point aptitude will mess up what I did in
steps 2 and 4 .. ??


Don't know. I try not to try to break things. Just learn how to use
the aptitude UI and get it set up then it won't mess anything up and
will try to keep you from messing anything up either.

Doug.



You could use the Aptitude CLI to unmark automatically installed packages before you upgrade/install
# aptitude unmarkauto --schedule-only '~i'

(see /usr/share/doc/aptitude/html/en/ch02s03.html in the aptitude-doc-en package for more about search patterns). This should stop Aptitude removing vital packages that it thinks were installed automatically but may have been installed in their own right by apt-get or Synaptic.

You can use switches to install without recommends
-R, --without-recommends

and fix dependencies
-f

Aptitude will warn you about packages that it proposes to remove during install. Check this list before proceeding.
Hope that helps.

You may find this thread helpful too: http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2006/05/msg01734.html

--
Chris.


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