man upgrade-system.conf (Formats) - upgrade-system(8) configuration file

NAME

upgrade-system.conf - upgrade-system(8) configuration file

DESCRIPTION

upgrade-system.conf is the configuration file for the upgrade-system(8) Debian administration utility. This file specifies options to be passed to apt-get(8) and deborphan(1).

Lines starting with a hash mark ("#") and empty lines are ignored.

EXAMPLE

The configuration file contains three variables:

CLEANOPTS

This variable is used to pass the command line option to apt-get(8), to determine whether the autoclean or clean action will be performed. For example:

CLEANOPTS="clean"

Consult the apt-get(8) manual page to check which options are available for any particular APT version, before setting this variable.

UPGRADEOPTS

This variable is used to pass command line options to apt-get(8) and to determine whether the dist-upgrade or upgrade action will be performed. For example:

UPGRADEOPTS="dist-upgrade"

Consult the apt-get(8) manual page to check which options are available for any particular APT version, before setting this variable.

ORPHANOPTS

This variable is used to pass command line options to deborphan(1), for selecting the orphaning operations. For example:

ORPHANOPTS="--guess-all --libdevel --priority=3"

One should read the deborphan(1), manual page to check which options are available for any particular version, before setting this variable.

SECURITY

Because upgrade-system is an APT front-end, all precautions relating to APT configuration should be observed. Special attention is required at:

/etc/apt/preferences

To prevent untested packages from overwriting stable ones, setting this combination of APT preferences is recommended:

Package:  *
Pin:  release a=stable
Pin-Priority:  990

Package: * Pin: release a=testing Pin-Priority: 500

Package: * Pin: release a=unstable Pin-Priority: 99

Package: * Pin: release a=experimental Pin-Priority: -1

This enforces a priority to packages from Stable, yet still allows ones from Testing, Unstable or Experimental to get installed via appropriate apt-get(8) options to override the default release.

deborphan

Certain combinations of deborphan(1) options purge a dangerous quantity of packages, potentially leaving a system in a severely crippled state.

AUTHORS

Martin Zdrahal <martin.zdrahal@konflux.at> made the original in 2003.

Martin-Eric Racine <q-funk@iki.fi> wrote this manual page, packaged the Debian archive and added various enhancements in 2004.

SEE ALSO