Dist upgrade re-installs uninstalled cups in "desktop" upgrade mode

[Markus Strobl]

Binary package hint: update-manager

I have some computers that will never print anything. For instance, one is a HTPC. I have uninstalled cups as I have no need for it. Another one is a netbook with limited disk space.

However, whenever I do a dist upgrade the dist-upgrade tool insists on re-installing cups complete with dependencies etc. On the HTPC it's an annoyance, on the netbook it will abort and complain about lack of disk space so I'll have to find stuff to remove to free up enough spece for cups to be installed just so I can remove it again.

Upgrade is from Karmic to Lucid. Method of upgrade is "do-release-upgrade -d"

It would be good if update-manager detected that cups was not installed and skipped it for the upgrade.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Thanks for your bugreport.

Can you please attach the files in /var/log/dist-upgrade ? This will help us diagnose the problem.

Thanks,
 Michael

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

The reason is most likely (the logs will confirm) that cups is a dependency of ubuntu-desktop. This is why update-manager puts it back in if it was removed. I think this is a valid assumption as most people will need printing support at one point or the other.

The "server" upgrade mode will not put meta packages back in place. It can be activated with "do-release-upgrade -d --mode=server".

[Markus Strobl (mstrobl2)]

Are there any other differences between server and desktop mode? If the only difference is the reinstall of deselected meta packages then I think that is an OK solution and we can close this bug report.

Maybe it would be good to add some info to the help section for do-release-upgrade? Currently it just says there is a desktop and server mode, but gives no info whatsoever what that means.