On Saturday 14 July 2018 21:16:45 Mike Bird wrote:
> On Sat July 14 2018 20:38:56 William Morder wrote:
> > Sorry, got to add my 2 cents' worth here. I believe that this must be a
> > Devuan bug; there could be problems with slim and tdm-trinity, although I
> > think it is immaterial to my point here.
> >
> > The reason I would trace it to Devuan is that I only ever ran apt-get
> > dist-upgrade; I never tried to install slim or xfce, nor libreoffice,
> > etc., but these were installed automatically. I had assumed, wrongly,
> > that I would get only upgrades of what was already installed.
>
> To upgrade existing packages use "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade".

I always do that, except that I don't put the two commands together. Is there 
some reason that it is better to run "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" and 
not "apt-get update" and then afterwards "apt-get upgrade"? 
>
> "apt-get dist-upgrade" is only required in complex situations, e.g.
> where other packages must be added or removed to accommodate package
> upgrades.  This normally only happens when upgrading to a new release.
>
> Whenever "apt-get dist-upgrade" is needed it is important to carefully
> check what apt-get proposes to do and determine to your own satisfaction
> that the proposed actions are sensible, safe, and appropriate.
>
Yes, I ought to have checked the list carefully, but I wasn't expecting any 
changes, as I had done this same thing many times previously without 
incident. I will blame it on my messed-up sleep patterns, and try to be more 
careful in future. 

> The information from "apt-get rdepends ..." and/or "aptitude why ..."
> is the first step on the road to determining whether this is a Devuan
> or Debian or PEBCAK problem.
>
> --Mike
>
I'll keep all this in mind when I try to get rid of systemd. Thanks for the 
information. 

Bill