why does upgrading arbitrary package decisions for me?

[Klegger]

I have performed automated upgrades three times now, and each time made me wonder a couple of things. The upgrades went general suitably well, however:

- why are some packages removed? I'm guessing this is because they're no longer being supported (the most notable one for me being galeon after having just upgraded from 9.10 to 10.04). However, what's wrong with just leaving them in so I can continue to use them? Why not give me the choice?

- why are very many new packages installed, which I never requested, and which are not dependencies for things already installed?

- is there a way to manually specify, individually or in groups, which packages get added or removed during an upgrade?

Apart from that, I'm a relatively happy user. THanks!

K.

[cariboo]

The reason some packages are removed upon upgrade is that some of the dependencies are newer than what the packages needs.

Other packages get installed as they are recommended packages for some of the packages that are upgraded.

You can select what packages get upgraded in either upgrade manager or synaptic package manager

[Klegger]

Thanks for the reply, cariboo907.

Now I wonder:

- Don't a large percentage of programs and libs that get updated have backwards compatibility with their own earlier versions? This certainly seems to be the case with many core libraries, and to be a very common practice with many projects.

- Is there a use case where I can see explicitly where this selection of packages (to be installed or not, and to be removed or not) can be made? The click-path I took to upgrade my OS was to hit the button that appeared in the upgrade manager, "upgrade to version 10.04 available". From then on, I saw no opportunity to make choices about what to install or what not to remove. I was given NOTICE of just about everything, yet no questions were asked about whether I wanted certain packages or not.

Thanks!
k