Jeremy C. Reed said:
> On Thu, 3 Jun 2004, George Gambill wrote:
>
>> Now, maybe you could explain to me why "apt-get install samba" worked
>> while "apt-get upgrade" didn't?
>
> In the previous email, you mentioned "packages have been kept back".
>
> This means these packages may cause some potential problems if updated.

As Jeremy stated, you were asking debian to do an "update".  It tries to
be polite and will hold back packages it thinks might be out of sync with
other packages on the system to prevent issues.  In this case since you
had a back port nearly all the packages were probably wanting samba2.x and
so it was holding back 3.x from being installed.  However, since it was a
backport.org package it was probably safe.

Doing the apt-get install basically tells the system I WANT THIS PACKAGE,
not upgrade if it looks okay.  So basically it will install the package
unless it has some "hard" dependency error.

> You could probably work-around that by doing "apt-get update
> PACKAGE-NAME-HERE".

Probably.  I guess I have never tried that. :)

> Or "apt-get dist-upgrade" could have done it too, but that could have
> update many other things too.

Generally I strongly recommend against dist-upgrade, UNLESS you truly are
going from one version of Debian to another.  Say from woody to sarge or
woody to sid...

That is mainly because doing an dist-upgrade when not changing from one
version of Debian to another has had ill results in the past for me and I
rarely find it necessary.  That of course is purely my opinion.  I know
others on the list like to dist-upgrade everytime instead of doing an
upgrade.

Some notes..

If you do apt-get -u upgrade it will show you all the packages it is going
to upgrade as well as install (which is sometimes nice to know).

Also, there are two packages (not sure if they are in woody)

apt-listchanges
apt-listbugs

I find these INVALUABLE when running unstable to keep a machine in good
working order.  The first "apt-listchanges" takes the change log from all
packages you upgrade and emails them to for review.  The second checks the
bug trackign system on debian for any "critical/severe" errors before
installing a package.  If it has any it will list them and let you review
them inline.  If you feel the package has issues you can "pin" it so that
it will not upgrade until the bug is closed.

-Derek


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