[plug]

[Denis Brown]

On Wed, 4 Jun 2003, Barry Cugley wrote:

> Hello all
> 
> The situation is that I use Debian and want to upgrade the dpkg's on my system. No other Debian Packages, just the ones I've got already. 
> 
> My question is, how do I do this?
> 
> A restriction on my question may be that I use a Winmodem (God forbid! But it's a fact). I undrstand that this will restrict upgrading the version of Debian but should not affect upgrading Debian Packages.

Ahhh... one I think I can answer!   Barry, I've been doing just that
(upgrading "just the packages I have") for several years by using
apt-get update
apt-get --simulate upgrade   (to be sure that what will happen is what I
want) and then
apt-get upgrade

Prior to this you want to point your /etc/apt/sources.list file to the
desired source of deb's.   One mistake I made was to leave "stable" in the
strings.   Worked just fine until one tiny machine tried to upgrade itself
from potato to woody and just about s**t itself.   Now I nominate exactly
what the release level is (potato, woody, ...)

If you don't want to use apt-get and instead want to stay with dpkg, I
think I have seen on this list a method whereby the existing package list
is saved to a file along the lines of
dpkg -l > mypackages

and then a corresponding dpkg command is issued, with the list of packages
coming from that text file
dpkg -some_command < mypackages

I do use dpkg occasionally but from very early days I became one of the
apt-get brigade.

Hope this helps,
Denis

P.S. This may not address your Winmodem driver issue.  I don't use them
myself so I'll be interested in others' replies.