Potato->woody upgrade fails

Gary Woodman antigramp at yahoo.com.au
Fri Nov 8 14:01:38 EST 2002


--- Alex Satrapa <grail at goldweb.com.au> wrote:
> 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.

That would presumably be why the Release Guide:
http://www.debian.org/releases/woody/i386/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.html#s-dselectupgrade
says: "The recommended method for upgrading to Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 is
using the package management tool dselect. This tool makes safer
decisions about packages than apt-get."

Dselect has worked well for me in the past, however, I'm happy to use
apt-get if it does the job. But I expected that upgrading the whole
distribution would produce the most complex
dependency/recommendation/suggestion tree possible. I'm trying to
follow recommendations, but it did a moist, fruity fart in my lap.

Gary

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