this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Is there a reason these commands weren’t at some point combined into one flag?

I can see why you’d want separate “update” and “upgrade” options, but another flag that does both without writing such a long command would be nice.

Maybe I just don’t know enough about apt and such a flag does exist? Maybe they’re just expecting folks to create an alias?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

If you use nala (frontend for apt) when you drop a "nala upgrade" it automatically calls update first

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I can see why you’d want separate “update” and “upgrade” options

i don't. anyone care to explain?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe for a server - regularly update the package list and compile a list of packages needed to be upgraded. Then send the list to an admin and let them do the update, so that it isn't unattended.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

makes sense, other package managers do the same. mixed it up with upgrade dist-upgrade which i still don't really get

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

upgrade upgrades only installed packages, and only when it can do so without adding/removing other packages. dist-upgrade will do the same, plus upgrade packages that have dependency changes. If package A v1 depends on package B, but package A v2 depends on package C instead, using upgrade will keep your package A at v1, while dist-upgrade will install the new dependency and upgrade package A to v2.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

great explanation, thank you :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can you also please elaborate on what full-upgrade does?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

full-upgrade is dist-upgrade, it got renamed because of the possible ambiguity (one could think that it upgrade your distribution, like from debian 11 to 12)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

If you want to install something, do you wish to just update before hand, or to upgrade too ? I guess the former.

Now you could add update to the install function, but it would mean if you updated 5 mins ago for install something, you would need to update again as you install something else.

Better to keep them separated and call them as you wish.