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Fabio
Asked: 2011-02-07 16:07:27 +0800 CST

Upgrade from Debian Lenny to Squeeze with apt-get

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I just upgraded my system from Lenny to Squeeze following the steps posted here. I followed all the steps using apt-get (in the upgrade from Etch to Lenny i used aptitude as suggested) and the upgrade went fine.

In the daily routine I use aptitude to maintain the system up to date and I really like the automatic handling of unused packages, so if I install package A that depends on B when I remove A, B is removed too keeping my system clean.

My question is the following: do apt-get and aptitude share the automatic handling of packages? I don't think so, because I found a lot of packages not marked as Auto in aptitude after the upgrade via apt-get.

Am I right? How can I fix this in automated way if the answer is yes?

debian apt aptitude debian-lenny

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    (Adding an answer so the information is here, too)

    aptitude keeps some state over and above the underlying apt-get system. This results in information set in one that the other doesn't know about. Years ago when I still used aptitude, I found myself doing update checks in both because I was getting confusing results. Using aptitude exclusively would hide this problem, but as soon as you something else, it becomes apparatnt.

    Solution: either use only aptitude or never use aptitude.

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  2. The release notes say you should use apt-get to upgrade, not aptitude.

    http://www.debian.org/releases/squeeze/i386/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.html#upgradingpackages+

    The recommended way to upgrade from previous Debian GNU/Linux releases is to use the package management tool apt-get. In previous releases, aptitude was recommended for this purpose, but recent versions of apt-get provide equivalent functionality and also have shown to more consistently give the desired upgrade results.

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  3. You can have automatic handling of unused packages by using apt-get --auto-remove remove/purge.

    If that's tedious to type, just make an alias. Mine is rr and rrp, respectively.

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