ubuntu 12.04 LTS how to avoid GRUB update‏

[Ralf Mardorf]

Hi Spyros,

Petters advices are likely all you need. Hold the grub-pc package and
perhaps the alternative bootloader packages that are recommended
dependencies for the linux-image and consider to install security
upgrades.

The following doubts could be important, assumed you're using a GUI for
apt.

On Thu, 14 Jan 2016 08:41:42 +0100, Petter Adsen wrote:
>3. 'apt-mark hold <list of removed packages>'
> This prevents them from being installed again

I'm uncertain if apt GUIs care about all apt preferences. IIRC (I might
be mistaken) Synaptic does not care about all apt preferences, instead
it provides it's own preferences. IIRC Synaptic allows to lock installed
packages, but not to prevent packages from getting installed. I might
be wrong. Synaptic and other GUIs should be tested. I might be mistaken
regarding the hold list, but there are definitively some pitfalls, at
least for Synaptic. I didn't use other GUIs.

I still have Synaptic installed, since it could be useful for some
purposes, but I switched to command line for most package managment
usage, to avoid pitfalls and in addition it allows me to easily maintain
my Ubuntu from another Linux install, by running it in a container.

I wonder if there is the need to upgrade using "apt-get dist-upgrade".
It makes sense doing this when using the development branch, but AFAIK
Ubuntu releases do not change package dependencies, IOW smart
upgrading might not be required, "apt-get upgrade" might be all that's
needed and I doubt that a non-smart upgrade installs recommended
dependencies, however, again this is just guessing, not knowledge.

You at least should care about change logs of the LTS' security
upgrades and install those that are important for you. After learning
what PXE is, I didn't know this before, my guess is, that this
kind of usage likely requires a security fix from time to time.

Thank you, now I don't receive duplicated mails any more.

Regards,
Ralf

PS: My high affinity for dummy packages came into being for two
reasons. It became a fashion of some apps that belong to bloated desktop
environments, to consider dependencies that are not necessarily needed,
as hard dependencies, so sometimes dummy packages are really useful,
but it might be possible to even fake a fulfilled dependency by the apt
preferences. The other reason is that I'm using different distros with
different package managements and sometimes I'm to lazy, to ensure that
everything works as expected without a dummy package. As already
pointed out, to ensure that apt-get from command line works as expected
is not an issue, but when using GUIs for apt-get, it could become
tricky.