Ubuntu – What’s the caret (^) mean in apt-get

apt

I'm seeing various instructions that request that you install something like:

apt-get install lamp-server^

With the oddball caret in the command. It doesn't seem to be mentioned in apt-get manual. What's the deal ?

Best Answer

The ^ character is not a typo. If you remove it, apt-get will complain that the package cannot be found.

This article and its comments describe what the caret does:

Well, the answer is that the caret symbol is a short form for performing a task that otherwise the program “tasksel” would have done with the given package name. tasksel is a program to ease the installation of commonly used things that go together for a particular use.

Related Solutions

Fixing Git Installation Errors with Apt-Get

Alright, I got it fixed. I had to manually remove the package and then force dpkg to clear itself. Afterwards I installed it from git-core and that worked fine. To manually remove the package I went to

/var/cache/apt/archives

And removed git_1%3a1.7.4.1-3_i386.deb file. After that I went to

/var/lib/dpkg/info

And did an ls | grep git and removed everything that turned up. Afterwards, I ran

sudo dpkg --remove --force-remove-reinstreq git

To clean dpkg of the package. Once that was done I was able to install git from git-core instead of the git package and it worked just fine.

Ubuntu – upgrade Mailman to the latest release via apt-get

You can use utopic's Mailman 2.1.18 package on trusty. (Source: I am using it, for precisely this reason, see Background below.)

To install it via apt-get, do the following:

First, configure the utopic repository by creating a file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/utopic.list with these contents:
```
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu utopic main restricted universe multiverse
```
Next, configure the system so that it does not automatically install packages from utopic (since otherwise you will upgrade to utopic the next time you run dist-upgrade). Create a file /etc/apt/preferences.d/utopic with these contents:
```
Package: *
Pin: release a=utopic
Pin-Priority: 100
```
Finally, install the mailman package, explicitly instructing apt-get to use the utopic version:
```
apt-get update && apt-get install mailman/utopic
```

Caution

Using packages from a newer release on an older release is not supported. If something goes wrong with this process you will likely be on your own bug-wise. However, I can confirm that my Mailman lists work after doing this.

Upgrading

You should remove the /etc/apt/sources.list.d/utopic.list and /etc/apt/preferences.d/utopic files before attempting any upgrade to a new version of Ubuntu from trusty.

Sources

These are based on the Ubuntu Backport instructions, substituting "utopic" for "trusty-backports"

Background

I also wanted 2.1.18, because the "ALLOW_FROM_IS_LIST = Yes" feature in 2.1.16 is list-wide. I don't want to re-write everyone as "from is list", just Yahoo users and others with a DMARC p=reject policy. 2.1.18 has a per-sender feature accessible from Privacy options → Sender filters in an individual list's admin interface.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Fixing Git Installation Errors with Apt-Get

Ubuntu – upgrade Mailman to the latest release via apt-get

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