Debian - Upgrade cpp-4.3 to cpp-4.4

Question

I have Debian Squeeze and I have cpp-4.3 which sits on it:

I want to know if I can remove cpp-4.3 and others and install something like cpp-4.4 or higher.

And why does aptitude does not upgrade cpp to 4.4 automatically?

Answer 1

There are three versions of gcc (including cpp) in Debian squeeze: 4.1, 4.3 and 4.4. You can install all of them if you like. I recommend installing the cpp package; it has cpp-4.4 as a depency, but when the next Debian version comes out, its cpp package will depend on whatever version is the newest then.

cpp-4.3 is marked as automatically installed, so if you remove all the packages that depend on it, it will be automatically uninstalled as well. At the moment, you have gcc-4.3 installed, and it depends on cpp-4.3. You also have g++-4.3 marked as manually installed, and it depends on gcc-4.3. Unless you know you want GCC 4.3, mark g++-4.3 as automatically installed, and make sure you have gcc and g++ installed.

After you've done this, consider removing the -4.3 packages and any other old version. Some packages will not be removed automatically even if they are marked as automatically installed and nothing depends on them specifically. That happens when some other package depends on a meta-package they provide. All C compilers, including gcc-4.3, provides c-compiler, so as long as you have a package that depends on c-compiler, gcc-4.3 will not be automatically removed. You can remove it manually; try it and check that nothing depends specifically on this version.