Potato->woody upgrade fails

Alex Satrapa grail at goldweb.com.au
Fri Nov 8 13:17:22 EST 2002


Sam Couter wrote:
> dselect is the recommended front-end to APT. apt-get is a back-end tool
> to use the APT library on a low level. It doesn't support all of the
> features that dselect does (Recommends and Suggests, for example).

But before using dselect, make sure you've got enough RAM, processor 
speed and wallclock time.  Due to the nature of the databases used by 
dselect (basically flat files), just launching and immediately quitting 
dselect takes about half an hour on eg: 486 with 8Mb RAM (and apt-get 
update takes 12 hours on this stupid Industrial PC I've got which only 
uses about 1/5th of the 16Mb RAM that's installed).

The apt-* tools are much faster than dselect because they don't mess 
with building complex dependency/recommendation/suggestion trees.




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