Upgrading

[Ander]

Hi,

Please pardon my ignorance...

I've done a Knoppix h/d install. It went fine. I'd now like to ugrade the system.

It's easy to upgrade a single Debian release (stable, testing, or unstable): You just "apt-get -u upgrade".

However, I understand that Knoppix uses packages from all three releases. So shouldn't you upgrade each package from its specific release?

If so, is there a way to do that in one operation? Or must you individually upgrade each package (which seems impossible)?

I've read the apt-get HOWTO's "Keeping a mixed system" section. It tells you only how to indicate a "default" release, and how to update specific packages, but that's about it.

Thanks for explaining. I don't want to screw anything up.

[m_yates]

You can do that with pinning. Creat a file called "preferences" and put it in /etc/apt. My preferences file is:

Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian a=testing
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 800

The pin priority number means that testing packages will be installed before unstable when upgrading, even if unstable has a newer version of the package. You can still install packages from unstable by specifying it. For example:

apt-get -t unstable install openoffice.org

will install the unstable version of openoffice. When you upgrade, simply type:

apt-get upgrade

The testing packages with be upgraded to the latest *testing* version and the unstable packages with be upgraded to the latest *unstable* version.

[Ander]

That's great---thanks!

I take it the stable packages have nothing to do with this, and will update normally?