When installing a package with apt-get, by default the packages listed in its Recommends: field will also be installed, along with the ones listed in its Depends: field. (And, if I'm not mistaken, recursively down the line.)
When running the exact same command line to tell apt-get to *upgrade* that package, the Depends: packages will in at least some cases be upgraded (at minimum, when the new version specifies dependencies on newer versions of the Depends:'ed packages), but the Recommends: ones apparently won't. Is there a way to tell apt-get (or related tools) to follow Recommends: when upgrading a specified already-installed package, just as it would do when installing that package? Ideally I'd prefer to be able to have this upgrade of Recommends: dependencies which have new versions available happen even when the package specified on the command line does *not* nave a new version available. The context I want this for is to be able to carry out the equivalent of a dist-upgrade piecemeal, using install command lines which specify only packages already marked as manually installed, and not miss packages which were installed automatically from a Recommends: field. The reason I want to do that is because I make a point of reviewing the changelogs for new package versions ahead of a package upgrade (using apt-listchanges), and I often find that the number of packages available for upgrade is so large that the resulting set of changelogs is so voluminous that it is unwieldy and impractical to review them all at one sitting. Being able to break the packages to be upgraded up into smaller groups, omit selected packages from the group if review shows I don't want to upgrade those particular packages yet, and let each group of packages get upgraded as soon as I've completed its review, makes the whole thing much easier. (The reason to limit the command lines to only packages marked as manually installed is because, from what I recall, specifying automatically-installed packages for upgrade in this way will cause them to be reclassified as manually-installed - which makes intuitive sense, but in this case is not what I want. I could go back afterward and mark them as automatically-installed again, but that can get unwieldy itself in some cases. I have seen some indications that perhaps this no longer happens, but I have not seen any notification about a change in the behavior, and I could not find any obvious mention of it in a review of 'apt changelog apt' - so I am hesitant to rely on it being the case.) -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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