more user-friendly than Update manager?

Christopher Browne cbbrowne-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Mon Apr 30 20:24:45 UTC 2012


On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 2:40 PM, Mr Chris Aitken <chris-n/jUll39koHNgV/OU4+dkA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Is there a more user-friendly way to get updates than Update manager?
>
> I see hundreds of suggested updates for things like Evolution that I don't
> even use. You can't Shift+Click to deselect ranges of updates. So I have to
> click each update of hundreds.
>
> Is there a faster way to do this?

I would suppose that if you don't use Evolution, and don't want
updates for it, then perhaps you should tell the package manager to
de-install it.

Then, you could just install "everything" that is recommended, and get
a more reasonable set.

This can sometimes work out badly if you ask to de-install some part
of (say) GNOME that a lot of other things depend on, some of which you
*do* care about.

My inclination would be to strategically pick certain things that I
*know* I don't want.  Evolution would be near the top of my list.  I
remove the set of undesirable things, which turns that "update of
hundreds" into more of a dull roar of "dozens," which I'm rather more
willing to accept.

I just ran apt-get update/apt-get dist-upgrade on my work workstation;
it's proposing to upgrade about 120 packages.

I notice that it includes a bunch of mono packages.  If I request to
'apt-get remove' one of them, that drops out a bunch of packages, the
only one of which I care *at all* about being sparkleshare, which is
loosely a "cloud filesystem" app.  I'm willing to drop that, which
cascades out 30 packages directly.  A run of "apt-get autoremove"
drops out another 30-ish packages, mostly libraries.

I notice it's upgrading sisu, which I experimented with a while back;
dropping that nukes ~6 more packages.

After that, the list falls to 94 packages to upgrade.  That looks like
it'll take ~5 minutes, and I think I can live with that.

Trying to have *no* updates seems like a losing battle to me.  Your
choices fall between two endpoints:

a) Pick a distribution that doesn't bother updating anything anymore.

That sucks, because it's likely got buggy software that won't get
fixed, and some day, some of those bugs will affect you, and your only
choice will be to do some sort of massively disruptive upgrade to a
massively new version.

"Oh, crap, Slackware 6.0 can't support my favorite app without me
compiling all of GNOME from scratch by hand.  Gotta upgrade."

b) Pick a distribution that continually updates things.
Debian/testing is a good case in point.

That sucks, because you'll have something of a torrent of new versions
of packages coming in.  Mind you, as long as you do upgrades
*reasonably* often, then there won't be a "massively disruptive
upgrade."
If you're running Ubuntu, and it's asking to update 100 packages, I'd
think that if you imagine you want to NOT do that, then I draw the
conclusion that Ubuntu is likely the wrong choice for you.

Any time you find yourself fighting against your distribution's
package management policies, then, more than likely, either:
a) They're right, and you're wrong.  (Which is pretty possible.  The
makers of the distribution should have greater competence at knowing
how to manage it than you do.)
b) The second possibility is that you want something that is good but
that the distribution makers didn't intend to make easy.  Which
implies that you made a poor choice of distributions.
c) Least likely is that you're right, and that they are morons.  Which
means you picked the wrong distribution, and you should see about
choosing otherwise, immediately, if not sooner.
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
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