mars

Upgrade

From APK section in the alpine user handbook:

Updating the system…one need only run apk upgrade. Technically, this is two steps: apk update, followed by apk upgrade proper.

The first step will download an updated > package index from the repositories, while the second step will > update all packages in world, as well as their dependencies.

Continuing…

apk will overwrite files you may have changed. These will usually by in the /etc directory.

Whenever apk wants to install a file, but realizes a potentially edited one is already present, it will write its file to that file name with .apk-new appended.

You may handle these by hand, but a utility called update-conf exists. Simply invoking it normally will present you with the difference between the two files, and offer various choices for dealing with the conflicts.

The first time I did an update, there were a reasonable number of these .apk-new ones. update-conf --list was helpful, and most of the new ones can be zapped, but not all; seem need to be dealt with more deftly.

The handbook is missing one step, the first one, which the Alpine wiki mentions:

  1. Update repositories file
  2. Updatating package lists
  3. Upgrading packages.

Step 1 is

emacs /etc/apk/repositories

and put the latest version.

There is a way to skip this step for future upgrades by putting latest-stable instead of version numbers, but the wiki cautions that this might lead to release upgrades when one is not expecting.

Step 2 is apk update.

Step 3 is apk upgrade --available. The --available is to do with updating pinned packages, but I’m not sure, so will just follow the recommendation.

If every thing goes well, we need a fourth step: reboot.

The reboot is not necessary, I could’ve just restarted the services that were updated, but reboot was easier, plus that also deals with the kernel update. From the wiki:

All services that have been upgraded need to be restarted, to begin using the upgraded version. If the kernel is upgraded, it’s required to it’s required to reboot to begin the upgraded version.

sync
reboot

Post reboot,

cat /etc/alpine-release

3.22.0
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