"Problem free" because a dist-upgrade from Etch testing to Etch stable did nothing to your system.... Its still Etch.

Someone is a little grumpy...

Grow a brain?
I stopped using the beta versions of Etch because of breakage issues and switched over to Slack. I'm not a newcomer to Unix/Linux and I don't appreciate the insult/sarcasm, okay?
If you don't have anything more constructive to say than this then keep your opinions to yourself.
I'm looking forward to running Debian again.

Not entirely true, you will occasionally need to do a dist-upgrade when running testing or unstable. Lets say you have randompackage_v1 which depends on randomlib.

randompackage_v2 has just arrived in testing/unstable, it now depends on someotherrandomlib instead. apt-get upgrade will only upgrade packages that are already on your system. As someotherrandomlib is not installed apt will refuse to upgrade randompackage.

During the process you will see something like "[...] and 1 not upgraded"

However apt-get dist-upgrade will install someotherrandomlib automatically and randompackage will be upgraded.

Just thought I'd clear that up.

Yeah - sry 'bout that guys. Was at work, and to put it lightly it wasnt a very fun day.

I apalogize for sounding so rude, but my post (other than the first sentence) was not meant to be sarcastic. I was just trying to state the point that Etch has been stable on most architectures since late 2006. Maybe your problems were before then, but all I know is Etch has not been getting any updates to most archetectures except for security updates. The only reason Etch was not dubbed "stable" by the debian developers was because they wanted all architectures to be 100% stable before they called any of them stable. That is all.

Again, I apalogize for my rude behavior earlier today.

apt-get install -f will install those lib packages you speak of.

Another solution (that I use often) is running dselect - I have found that dselect catches dependacy issues far better than apt-get does (like the lib packages you speak of) and will install them - without running a dist-upgrade.

Another note. dist-upgrade will not hurt to run. If it makes things easier for you, by all means do it. Its not like dist-upgrade will "accidentally" break something if you haven't changed your sources or anything. Its a perfectly safe command.

Hehehe perhaps apt-get dselect-upgrade would do the trick . It's all down to personal preference. I just wanted to clear up your strong usage of the word ONLY, it might send confusing messages to those new to the Debian world.

No it won't. Daws is correct.

apt-get install -f helps when an conflict occurs (the f is for fix.) For example, if I used dpkg to manually force install k3b but forgot to install libk3b3, dpkg would complain about the missing dependency. That is where apt-get install -f comes into play (or maybe if an upgrade breaks midprocess.)

In the situation where packages are being help back because new dependencies are introduced (or removed) dpkg will not see any breaks in the system. That is because there are no breaks as far as dependencies are concerned. So there would be nothing for apt-get -f to fix.

That's okay:-) No harm done:-) No need to apologize, I know what it is like to have a really bad day at work. I also don't usually get heated under the collar, but, I'm tired, had a late night last night.

Yes, I know that Etch has been stable for quite some time, I've just been unlucky methinks:-) Going to give Etch stable another go tomorrow or the next day when I get some sleep.

P.S. Does anyone know if the signing key issue (that was causing breakage problems) applies to Etch 4.0 stable? I'm planning on using the 159 MB net install iso.

IFAIK the GPG issue has been resolved and the offending key removed. Haven't seen references to it during dist-upgrades for weeks

Some repos may still be giving a message about unauthenticated packages, but I just ignore it. Heard it would be fixed shortly ... maybe already.

using apt-pinning

It's quite alright. Actually the "upgrade" did do something to my system - it installed around 10 packages. What I was thinking of when I said it went off without a hitch was the upgrade I did on my fileserver about a month ago - openbsd-inetd (IIRC) had a bug that caused that upgrade to grind to a halt, much to my dismay and confusion. Nothing like that happened over the weekend.

Thank you! I appreciate the reply!