[plug] Apt upgrading

[Sham Chukoury]

On Tue, 2003-12-30 at 10:25, smclevie wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm working through the Debian setup cd (Woody) and trying to make a long 
> list of installation steps for my friend prior to his attempt at installing 
> Debian because of the precious lack of such info out there.

Erm. Precious lack of info concerning installing Debian?

http://www.au.debian.org/releases/stable/installmanual
http://www.au.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/install

I reckon Debian is the distro with the most docs all over the place...
Everything from help docs to policy docs.

> I have a fairly predictable time all the way except for apt.  (I am running 
> a version of apt that hasn't even got man pages setup yet according to the 
> man page dated 16 June 1998).  I have tried to update the apt and my apt 
> reckons it is the latest available ... which is certainly not the case!!

I'm running Debian unstable here, and actually managed a dist-upgrade
yesterday, after IT.net.au *finally* finished re-syncing the Deb mirror.
(IT.net.au rocks - cheers for the WAIX GNU & Deb mirror ;) ) One of the
things that got upgraded was apt. Looking at "man apt" right now gives
this as the last line:
"Debian GNU/Linux                 16 June 1998                          
apt(8)"

However, "apt-get --version" gives this:

Shambhala:~$ apt-get --version
apt 0.5.17 for linux i386 compiled on Dec 26 2003 15:10:13
<rest of output snipped>

Also notice the "SEE ALSO" section in the apt man page...


> At one point I hand edited the sources.list file to try to make it get 
> 'testing' archives and it still reverted to the 'stable' suite!!!

As James pointed out... Try "apt-get update" after modifying the
sources.list file.


> It really is an easy package to break also.  Interrupted downloads have 
> buggered things up for me... I cannot run through apt-setup without getting 
> a 'Failed to fetch ...' message.  It just won't budge away from this 
> regardless of alternate mirrors etc.  Am I right to think that apt-setup is 
> linked to 'base-config'??  Just why is a brand new install being a bugger?

'Failed to fetch...'?
1) What is the complete error message? (an example)
2) Which mirrors were you using at the time?

Why it's being a bugger.. hmm. Well, you mentioned that you were using a
Deb Woody CD for the install. Then you mentioned trying to get to the
'testing' packages. Am I right in assuming you're trying to set up a
Debian Testing system, rather than just following the Debian Woody setup
from start to finish? If that's the case, I recommend following the
Debian Stable installation instructions until you have a working system
(i.e. finish the setup for the stable system), only then change the
sources.list and do "apt-get dist-upgrade". Otherwise, google for
advice. :)


> Q2.  When apt is loading the list of packages on initial connection, where 
> does it store this file and what is it called?  (I reckon I'll store this 
> file so that I don't have to keep going through the hours of downloads for 
> each install....)

The package list isn't downloaded every time you run "apt-get update"...
Apt somehow figures out if the package list has been updated or not. I
dunno what the package list file itself might be called (when being
downloaded), but I don't think apt leaves it lying around after having
processed it. Therefore, it might not be possible to trick apt into
accepting pre-downloaded package list files (without some really clever
hacking). AFAIK, apt stores its list of packages in /var/cache/apt/*.bin
There's usually one for binary packages and another one for source
packages.

§:)