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Joren
Asked: 2013-08-18 05:42:16 +0800 CST

The purpose of updating after adding a ppa repository

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When adding a ppa repository using sudo add-apt-repository ppa:..., why should I execute sudo apt-get update?

I am new to Ubuntu and I don't see the purpose of it because there aren't packages installed from the repo. It only takes a lot of time to cycle through my installed packages.

ppa

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    From the manpages:

    update is used to resynchronize the package index files from their sources.
           The indexes of available packages are fetched from the location(s) specified
           in /etc/apt/sources.list. For example, when using a Debian archive, this
           command retrieves and scans the Packages.gz files, so that information about
           new and updated packages is available. An update should always be performed
           before an upgrade or dist-upgrade. Please be aware that the overall progress
           meter will be incorrect as the size of the package files cannot be known in
           advance.

    Adding apt-add-repository just adds a line to /etc/apt/source.list.

    apt-get update downloads the latest package index from all the known repositories

    Also I recommend reading apt-get wiki pages

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