Marty wrote: > So what you are saying is consistent with the others -- apt does not "know" > or "care about" the "Debian version." I knew this to be true with dpkg, > but not apt.
APT does not know or care about any "Debian version" that you seem to be trying to make up. It does not exist. Don't try to create one. APT will try to upgrade all of the packages to the latest versions that are available to be installed as pointed to in the sources.list file. If you point sources.list to sid and install packages from there then you would be said to be running sid. But what is Sid? It changes daily. Releases are hard to grip on firmly. Since multiple kernels are available for any given release it is not based upon the kernel. Both 2.4 and 2.6 are supported for Sarge. I think the 'base-files' package is often used as an indication of what Debian version you have installed since it contains the /etc/debian_version file. But regardless of the contents of that file you can install different combinations of packages. Personally I associate the release to the version of glibc that you are using. Since that is the number one dependency of programs on your system this makes sense to me. Woody had libc6-2.2.5 and Sarge has libc6-2.3.2. That has more meaning to me than anything else on the system. APT does have preferences and pinning. You can instruct apt with the preferences to prefer one or another distribution. See the apt_preferences documentation. But many people in the know about pinning has expressed the opinion that it is one good way to really break your system. I avoid it and recommend that you do too. man apt_preferences APT does support two different configuration file setups. One is a single /etc/apt/apt.conf file. The other is any file placed in the /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/ directory. The first is convenient for people. The second is convenient for automated scripts. People edit files fine and so the single apt.conf is good for people. But scripts work better when you have them just drop files into place and remove them when they need to go away. Other than this distinction, which is to say there is no difference at all, all of those files are equivalent and you can mix and match them. You do not need any of them by default. You only need to give APT extra configuration if you want to set something that is not the default. I work behind a web proxy and I must set the web proxy there or apt can't get out. I also like seeing what is going to get upgraded even if I forget the -u option. So an example of a configuration that might be put there would be the following. APT::Get::Show-Upgraded "true"; Bob
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