Aptitude: actions upgrade and dist-upgrades are deprecated
Version 0.4.6.1-1ubuntu1 from the gutsy repositories (aptitude 0.4.6.1) has shown some changes. One of them is the replacement of upgrade with safe-upgrade and dist-upgrade with full-upgrade. From man aptitude:
safe-upgrade
Upgrades installed packages to their most recent version. Installed
packages will not be removed unless they are unused (see the
section “Managing Automatically Installed Packages” in the aptitude
reference manual); packages which are not currently installed will
not be installed.
It is sometimes necessary to remove or install one package in order
to upgrade another; this command is not able to upgrade packages in
such situations. Use the full-upgrade command to upgrade as many
packages as possible.
full-upgrade
Upgrades installed packages to their most recent version, removing
or installing packages as necessary. This command is less
conservative than safe-upgrade and thus more likely to perform
unwanted actions. However, it is capable of upgrading packages that
safe-upgrade cannot upgrade.
Note
This command was originally named dist-upgrade for historical
reasons, and aptitude still recognizes dist-upgrade as a synonym
for full-upgrade.
Please note that dist-upgrade will still work as usual, and that you will get this message when upgrading:
isabella@yeti:~ $ sudo aptitude upgrade [sudo] password for isabella: W: The "upgrade" command is deprecated; use "safe-upgrade" instead.
References
UF thread
Bug related to auto-completion in bash with new aptitude actions
Previous blog entry with a tutorial about aptitude









août 14th, 2007 at 16:01
Thanks for pointing this out. I wasn’t aware this was changing.
août 14th, 2007 at 18:06
You’re welcome, K.Mandla!
I actually found out in the UF thread the day aptitude got upgraded, and tried it out on gutsy (I did not blog about it right away, and then sort of forgot about it…). Autocompletion still does not work in bash, but I had no time to look more seriously at the fix in the bug report.