Upgrading Packages

GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide
by Graham Williams

Upgrading Packages

You can upgrade all installed packages with:

$ wajig upgrade (apt-get -u upgrade)

And you can upgrade all installed packages, remove those packages that need to be removed (for various reasons, including issues to do with dependencies) and install all newly required packages in the distribution with:

$ wajig dist-upgrade (apt-get -u dist-upgrade)

Note that a dist-upgrade will potentially remove packages where dependency checking indicates this is necessary. Important packages (determined by the Priority specification which can be found using the details command) will be upgraded even at the cost of downgrading other (less important) packages.

If this is an issue for you then you should use the upgrade command rather than dist-upgrade. This command will never remove or downgrade a package.

To upgrade to a specific distribution (e.g., experimental) you can use:

$ wajig dist-upgrade experimental

Note that the mentioned distribution must also be mentioned in your /etc/apt/sources.list file.

A neat trick with wajig is the ability to upgrade a collection of packages all with the same version number to another common version number:

$ wajig status | grep 3.2.3-2 | grep 3.3.0-1 | cut -f1 > list $ wajig install-file list