Re: update messages

One of the things that bothered me about what aptitude wanted to do
was that it included several packages it threatened to remove because
they were 'no longer used'. I don't know how it decided this, as the
list included packages like 'xv' and 'xearth' which I explicitly
installed and definately use quite regularly....

run aptitude in interactive mode and manually mark those packages:

aptitude

then 'u' to update, 'U' to mark for upgrade, then 'g' to see what it
want to do. scroll through and mark 'm' on those you want to keep,
which should mark them as manually installed. you may need to '+'
them as well, to keep them around. I have not been using aptitude long
(having used apt-get exclusively before), but am learning that you can
actually get it to do what *you* want with a little fiddling. Then it
will generally respect what you want...

So this behaviour could be the result of my having installed some
applications using 'apt-get install' rather than aptitude, leaving
aptitude unaware of them being manual rather than automatic
installs? That would explain things.

absolutely correct.

keep on pluggin' away

It seems I am not out of the woods yet. I just tried executing
apt-get install libx11-dev
which is the package I needed to install in the first place when I
got distracted onto upgrading my system..

Amoungst the actions it threatened to do was:
The following packages will be REMOVED
gnome gnome-core gnome-desktop-environment gnome-doc-utils gnome-office
lbxproxy libapache2-mod-php4 libapache2-mod-python proxymngr python-libxml2
python-newt python2.3-imaging-tk python2.3-tk skencil sketch totem
x-window-system xdm xearth xfs xfwp xlibs xlibs-data xlockmore-gl xprint
xserver-common xv xvfb yelp

I was again disturbed by the threatened removal of some applications I
know I regularly use (such as xearth, xv and totem), so I did some
digging starting with 'xearth', and it seems that package has been
removed from testing (but not stable or unstable) and the version I
had installed (1.1-10.1) requires xbase < 3.3.2.3a-2 which presumably
conflicts with other packages which are required for for the libx11-dev
package..

The page which I found indicating the removal of xearth from testing is
http://packages.qa.debian.org/x/xearth.html
but it doesn't give any explanation of why, and I am not sure where to
look next.

Should I be fetching the unstable version? Or would it be better to
just install from source and forget the debian packages for this
application?

Not sure about the other packages - totem for example appears to
have a newer version available, so I don't understand why the threat
to delete it.

And xv I havn't found at all in the packages database :-/
Regards,
DigbyT
--
Digby R. S. Tarvin digbyt(at)digbyt.com
http://www.digbyt.com


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