The Underscore Archives

On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 16:59 +0100, Steve Roome wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 01, 2008 at 04:21:17PM +0100, Daniel Hilton wrote:
> > Hi [ _ ]
> > 
> > In debian, if I run apt-get on a package and it tells me its going to
> > remove some packages, will it do so without breaking anything or
> > overwriting a configuration file? I'm trying to get nagios running but
> > am worried I'm going to break something.
> 
> It might, it shouldn't, but it might. Well, it will overwrite config
> files or regenerate them (exim hit me like that last time on debian).

It should only overwrite after prompting you , otherwise you should 
file a bug . I've seen some packages create .new versions of config
files so you can manually audit the changes , also you should get the
option to view a diff between the current and proposed file.

The config files should be left where they are unless you
explicitly remove with dpkg and give it the --purge option.

Generally i trust it to behave on stable releases but if
you are using testing/experimental/backports then it may well break.

> btw, aptitude is quite handy instead of manually apt-getting things.

they are pretty much identical except that aptitude is a bit better
at resolving large dependency chains (i.e dist-upgrade)

Toodle-pip
Amias
-- 
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