Dependancy Hell

[Anton Markov]

Mike Newman wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 16:18:03 -0500, Lennart Sorensen
> <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 
>>I have only used dist-upgrade for the last 6 years and it has always
>>worked great for me, so I never use upgrade.
> 
> In fact, if you use the (IMO excellent) Synaptic it now does
> dist-upgrade by default (although I believe they call it "smart
> upgrading" or some such...)
> Definitely a good move, though.

Be careful about using dist-upgrade automatically though, especially 
when tracking unstable. Over the past six months I can count three times 
when incomplete uploads (only some packages from a tree of dependencies) 
caused big problems for me (or would have with dist-upgrade). This is 
most common with KDE and other inter-dependent systems (the kde 3.2.2 to 
3.2.3 upgrade was a stormy ride), but the most recent one involves 
libflac4 conflicting with libflac6. dist-upgrade wants to uninstall a 
bunch of packages which depend on libflac4 in order to install libflac6 
and one package which requires it. This is when you use plain 'upgrade' 
to ignore that group of packages and wait out the storm.

-- 
Anton Markov <("anton" + "@" + "truxtar" + "." + "com")>

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