[Techtalk] Debian apt and dpkg help, please

[Liz Young]

On Sunday 24 August 2003 05:43 pm, Carla Schroder wrote:
> OK- what's the best way to upgrade individual applications? I'm
> looking at this page, among others,
> http://cafecomputer.com/guide/ch-iraus.en.html, and it's not clear to
> me how to select individual apps for upgrade. For example, Kmail. I'm
> seeing purges, I'm seeing downgrades- I don't want to go backwards!

Okay, here are my seekrit codes :-)  Just kidding!  I use apt-get and 
apt-cache for almost everything,  and dpkg for the glitches like you 
just had.  What's getting downgraded in your dist-upgrade?  Try 
apt-cache policy <packagename> to see the available versions/sources.  

Kmail is not a good example for upgrading a single app -- it's part of 
kdenetwork, which has a gazillion kde dependencies (as you already 
found out), so dist-upgrading the backport of KDE3.1.3 in Woody is your 
best bet.  If you're starting over, try "apt-get remove libarts1-bin" 
before the dist-upgrade.

For another example (with less dependencies), last week I decided to 
have a look at the new version of Evolution (which is in Sid) so I did 
this:
o  un-remarked the unstable tree in my sources.list.
o  apt-get update.
o  apt-get -s install evolution/unstable.  Looked over what was getting 
removed/upgraded/added (14 packages? about 20 megs?, mozilla, galeon, 
some gnome stuff, okay).
o  apt-get -y install evolution/unstable.
o  rem the unstable tree in sources.list.
o  apt-get update.

Done.  Everything's working happily. The new version of Evo is really 
nice, but I still prefer Kmail :-) 

-Liz