You have pointed a SUSE machine's repositories at the next distribution release and now want the whole installed package set brought into line with those repositories, allowing packages to be downgraded, replaced by a differently named successor or removed where necessary. Which zypper command performs that kind of upgrade?
LPIC-1 Exam 101-500, objective 102. Linux installation and package management medium
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How these questions are written — where each question comes from, what the verification ledger records, and what happens when one is found wrong.
The options
Not correct zypper update
Wrong for this task. update (up) only moves installed packages to newer versions and will not downgrade, will not change vendors and will not remove packages to satisfy the new set.
Correct zypper dist-upgrade
Correct. dist-upgrade (dup) recomputes the whole installation against the currently configured repositories and is the supported way to move between releases.
Not correct zypper patch
Wrong. patch installs the officially issued patches that apply to the installed system, which is a maintenance update within one release.
Not correct zypper install -t pattern base
Wrong. That installs a pattern, which is a named group of packages, and leaves the rest of the system where it is.
Why
The discriminator is direction and freedom of movement: update is constrained to newer versions of what you already have, while dist-upgrade treats the repositories as the target state and is free to downgrade, swap vendors or drop packages to reach it. The Debian world draws the same line between apt upgrade and apt full-upgrade or apt-get dist-upgrade. Because dist-upgrade can remove packages, it is always run with the repository list checked first.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- manual page zypper(8)
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 102 and space the ones you get wrong.
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