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David Hare wrote:
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I am consequently quite curious as to why aptitude would install the missing packages; whereas apt-get would not. I could not find anything in the release notes or the Debian installation instructions to indicate that in upgrading to 3.5.13 aptitude should be used instead of apt-get. I initially used apt-get because the release notes and instructions for the Lenny to Squeeze upgrade specifically recommended using apt-get instead of aptitude.
Ken Heard, Toronto, Canada
I don't use aptitude myself so can't help much with that.
What I do know is, <apt-get upgrade> is a "safe upgrade" command which upgrades only those packages (or libs) which do not affect other packages. That's where you got into difficulty.
What you needed was actually <apt-get dist-upgrade> (see <man apt-get>)
Hadn't thought of using the apt-get dist-upgrade option to upgrade to kde-trinity 3.5.13, although I did use it as instructed to upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze. It is too late now to find out whether using apt-get dist-upgrade for the first attempt to upgrade to 3.5.13 would have avoided the problem I encountered.
For everyday use, you should stick to one or the other as their package-tracking databases may differ
They do differ; so one should indeed stick to one or the other. In fact the upgrade option in aptitude has been deprecated; aptitude now insists on either safe-upgrade or full-upgrade, but for the latter will for historical reasons accept dist-upgrade.
Apt-get upgrade option seems to be the same as the safe-upgrade option in aptitude, but the dist-upgrade in apt-get does not seem to be the same as the aptitude full-upgrade option. Apt-get also has a deselect-upgrade option.
Chapter 4.4 of the Squeeze release notes (1) states: "In previous releases aptitude was recommend, but recent versions of apt-get provide equivalent functionality and also have show to give *more consistently* the desired upgrade results." (Emphasis mine)
1. http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/release-notes/index-en.html
Ken