Thanks for the prompt reply! The Wanderer wrote:
On 2017-08-02 at 11:44, Christoph Groth wrote:
> I'm running Debian testing and would like to upgrade from > "oldtesting" (jessie) to current testing. I noticed that 'apt> upgrade' as well as 'apt-get upgrade' want to install the > package> 'pulsaudio' which I've been avoiding successfully so far.That's a little weird. According to the apt-get man page, 'upgrade' willnever install a package which is not already installed.
Sorry, I was a bit imprecise. The three tools (apt-get, aptitude & apt) behave in slightly different ways. I should have simply asked whether there is any way (other than aptitude's option) to know why something is about to be installed either by "upgrade" or "dist-upgrade"
The 'upgrade' command for apt behaves differently; that one will install new packages if needed, but will never remove an existing package.Are you certain that both commands produce the same install-new-packageresult?> I could of course uninstall pulseaudio after the upgrade, but > I> wonder whether a more elegant solution does not exist.Try 'apt-get upgrade pulseaudio-'; the trailing hyphen should tell apt-get to remove the package, which in this case means not installing it. I more usually use this sort of thing with dist-upgrade, but AFAIKit should work for upgrade as well.
Thanks, this works (with a small modification). If I execute 'apt-get full-upgrade pulseaudio-' APT suddenly wants to install pulsaudio:i386 along with dozens of other i386 packages. (I'm aware of multiarch and use it, but didn't know that packages from one arch can substitute others.) Executing 'apt-get full-upgrade pulseaudio- pulseaudio:i386-' does the trick.