Quite regularly, I let my Debian Sid/Unstable chroot stay untouch for a while, and when I need to update it there is not enough free @@ -45,16 +45,30 @@ for p in $(apt list --upgradable | ignore "$@" |cut -d/ -f1 | grep -v '^Listing. done
-To use it, simply run it as root from the command line. If it -fail, try 'apt install -f' to clean up the mess and run the script -again.
+The script will extract the list of packages to upgrade, try to +download the packages needed to upgrade one package, install the +downloaded packages using dpkg. The idea is to upgrade packages +without changing the APT mark for the package (ie the one recording of +the package was manually requested or pulled in as a dependency). To +use it, simply run it as root from the command line. If it fail, try +'apt install -f' to clean up the mess and run the script again. This +might happen if the new packages conflict with one of the old +packages. dpkg is unable to remove, while apt can do this.
-It take one option, a package to ingore in the list of packages to +
It take one option, a package to ignore in the list of packages to upgrade. The option to ignore a package is there to be able to skip the packages that are simply too large to unpack. Today this was 'ghc', but I have run into other large packages causing similar problems earlier (like TeX).
+Update 2018-07-08: Thanks to Paul Wise, I am aware of two +alternative ways to handle this. The "unattended-upgrades +--minimal-upgrade-steps" option will try to calculate upgrade sets for +each package to upgrade, and then upgrade them in order, smallest set +first. It might be a better option than my above mentioned script. +Also, "aptutude upgrade" can upgrade single packages, thus avoiding +the need for using "dpkg -i" in the script above.
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