I installed listbugs. Now when I run apt-get upgrade or apt-get dist-upgrade, it presents me with the synopsis of what is going to be upgraded, installed, removed etc., and asks if I want to continue. I say yes, and it then starts to run and generates the bug report. After listing the bug report, it asks if I am sure I want to install/upgrade the above packages. If I say no, it cancels the whole upgrade process. How do I upgrade the good files without upgrading the files that contain bugs? I have googled this and looked in the APT How-to, and can't even find anything on the subject.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Try man apt-listbugs for more information.

I believe you can pin the packages you have that have a bug in the upgrade by pressing p. Then the process will end and you will have to run it again. This time it should upgrade only those packages that are left.

First of all, some bug reports that apt-listbugs shows are marked as <done>, and these packages should be safe to install. Only those marked as <open> are the ones you'll want to avoid from installing.

I use aptitude to manage packages and in aptitude it's easy to mark a package to be freezed (and not upgraded) by highlighting the package and pressing "=". It's also easy to unfreeze packages with "+". I haven't use Synaptic in ages, but I seem to recall that this was easy also in Synaptic. Or you can use dpkg to "hold" packages but I'll leave it to someone else to explain how to do this.

I read the man page for apt-listbugs. It did list all of the options, but I did not see any that would allow me to install all of the good files and not install the bugged files. Plus, listbugs is automatically running as part of apt-get upgrade. Is there a way to configure apt-listbugs to allow me to continue on with the upgrade without upgrading the files that are in the bug list?

Well.. as I said.. press P to pin the buggy packages, then run the process again. That -should- do it.

Ya awhile back I sent an email to the apt-listbug guy about makeing the question of weather or not to continue to mean yes or no for the bug mentioned and not the other packages in an upgrade.
Never got a reply and or a new version.
No biggy,I use aptitude as well and can pin it to hold a pakage but,I have always just went ahead and said yes

Do be careful though.. some of those bugs can be pretty grave. As long as you have proper backups things will be alright

For some reason, I misunderstood edwines first post about hitting P to pin the buggy upgrades. I did that and reran apt-get dist-upgrade and it installed the good updates just fine. Thanks for the help!!

Another solution to the problem would be to go to the Debian bug database and check the bugs. Most times the bug is for some old version of the package you are installing thus you would actually be getting the fixed package during the install and more than a few of them bugs you see listed are stupidness on the part of clueless users reporting things that are not even bugs or bugs that apply to another package. BTW have you heard of apt-listchanges it is similar to apt-listbugs in that it will show you the changelogs of the packages you are installing there is some good information in there sometimes. One more thing if you are using Konqueror for a web browser or have it installed you can type into the Location bar dbug:bug_number then enter and it will take you directly to the Debian bug page.

I'd also like to add to the above information that aptitude has a very cool feature, similar to apt-listchanges. You can highlight a package and press Shift-c (like in uppercase C) and with most packages this will fetch and show you the changelog of a package. This can be quite useful with some packages when you want to view what has actually changed between different release versions.

I really need to learn how to use aptitude. It sound a lot more thorough that just apt.