[plug] apt-get and Debian testing

[James Bromberger]

On Sun, Sep 23, 2001 at 03:12:55PM +0800, Arkem wrote:
> 1. dpkg --get-selections to create a file with the previous package 
> settings so in case of a disaster I can revert.
> 2. apt-get update with -q -y to get a new list of packages
> 3. apt-get dist-upgrade -q -y --show-upgraded to do the update

Sure, doing get-selections is a very good thing to have. Make sure you 
put the output somewhere that your system backup is going to pick it up 
from. For example, you could stuff this somewhere into /etc, and when you 
backup /etc, it'll be taken care of for you.

You are doing backups, right? tar -cjf /etc /var/backups/`hostname`-etc.tbz. 
Ie, make a bzip compressed tar of /etc. Put this onto removable media. Or 
copy this to another host. Or both.

Doing and update is cool. I use the following:

	#!/bin/sh
	/usr/bin/apt-get update
	/usr/bin/apt-get upgrade -d -y
	/usr/bin/apt-get autoclean

I do not actually let it do the upgrade unattended; I think that is a 
little risky, There are quite often configuration questions that need to be 
asked interactively, and although DebConf is addressing this, it pays to 
pay attention. Put the above four lines to /usr/local/bin/system-update.sh, 
and add a cron entry for root for however regularly you like.  You could add 
a fifth line and combine the get -selections:
	/usr/bin/dpkg --get-selections > /etc/debian-selections.txt

This will update the list, fetch but not install new packages, and clean out 
the old versions of packages. You can then come along when you are deay, and 
do an apt-get upgrade (or "install <package>") and everything should already 
be nice and fast and ready for you.


> The output of this operation would be mailed to root, so I'd know 
> what has happened. I'd probably run this maybe weekly or monthly. Is 
> this a safe thing to do? Is there a better way to achieve this? Would 
> a solution like this also be appropriate for a Debian unstable box?

Unstable: definitely not. I dont even do an upgrade on unstable. I get a 
list of new packages, and then install them a few at a time, based on the 
amount of risk the package poses should something go wrong. For example, 
if there are a new set of mozilla binarie,s I thow them all in striaght away. 
A set of new C libraries are done slowly, one at a time (unless dependencies 
require a few together),


Hope that helps,

  James


-- 
 James Bromberger <james_AT_rcpt.to> www.james.rcpt.to

 Remainder moved to http://www.james.rcpt.to/james/sig.html
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