Re: Total confusion with aptitude. Help, please!

Hi again,

On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 08:47:35PM -0500, Mumia W.. wrote:
On 06/19/2008 02:22 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
Hi, debian!

My system: Debian Sarge, with little alteration other than a kernel
upgrade (to 2.6.8).

I currently have aptitude 0.2.15.9 compiled at Apr 7 2005 13:32:48. I
am having severe problems with it, and have become totally confused.

I start aptitude. This status message appears at the top right of the
screen:

#Broken: 12 Will free 16.7MB of disk space DL Size: 6215kB
[...]

Would somebody please explain what's happened to my system, and how to
fix it. I would like to be able to _just_ install software, in
particular a >= 2.4 version of python.

Is there perhaps some command (apt-foo, perhaps??) which could rebuild
the package database on my system?

Is there perhaps a less flexible, easier to use package manager?
aptitude is about as complicated as mutt, but because I only use
aptitude at most a few times a year, I'm never going to get to grips
properly with it.

Thanks in advance for the help!


To know what is going on with your system, we would need to see your
/etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/preferences files.

#/etc/apt/sources.list:
#########################################################################
deb ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib
deb-src ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib

deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib
#########################################################################

I haven't got an /etc/apt/preferences. However, I can see one problem.
I've got "stable" where I really want to have "sarge". "stable" points
at the current Debian release, which changes every now and then. This
seems a source of my problems.

The output of this command would also help:
aptitude -sV upgrade

#########################################################################
[ a few status messages from reading the archive ]
The following packages are unused and will be REMOVED:
cjk-latex [4.5.1-4 -> 4.7.0+cvs20061019-2]
freetype1-tools [1.4pre.20030402-1.1 -> 1.4pre.20050518-0.4]
hlatex [0.991-6 -> 1.0.1-2.1] hlatex-fonts-base [0.991-2.1 -> 1.0-3.1]
libttf2 [1.4pre.20030402-1.1 -> 1.4pre.20050518-0.4]
The following packages have been kept back:
a2ps [1:4.13b-4.3 -> 1:4.13b.dfsg.1-1]
....
bsdmainutils [6.0.17 -> 6.1.6] bsdutils [1:2.12p-4 -> 1:2.12r-19etch1]
.... [~500 packages "kept back"]
zlib1g-dev [1:1.2.2-4 -> 1:1.2.3-13]
The following packages will be upgraded:
apsfilter [7.2.6-1 -> 7.2.6-1.1] base-files [3.1.2 -> 4]
.... [ ~70 packages "will be upgraded]
xml-core [0.09 -> 0.09-0.1]
The following packages are RECOMMENDED but will NOT be installed:
latex-cjk-all [4.7.0+cvs20061019-2] libcompress-zlib-perl [1.42-2]
libeel2-2.14 [2.14.3-5] libft-perl [1.2-16] libhtml-format-perl [2.04-1]
lsb-base [3.1-23.2etch1] wbritish [6-2] x-ttcidfont-conf [25.1]
99 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 5 to remove and 762 not upgraded.
Need to get 152MB of archives. After unpacking 57.5MB will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] Would download/install/remove packages.
#########################################################################

I suspect that your attempt to upgrade python broke your system. If you
are not an expert with Debian, it is best to stick with a single
distribution (e.g. "stable") rather than to mix distributions (e.g.
"oldstable"+"stable").

I was expecting that in using a package manager, it would simply do the
Right Thing, without me having to worry. Again, I think the problem for
me is that the meaning of "stable" has changed from "sarge" to "etch".
Presumably this was a deliberate choice of the Debian team, on the
assumption that most people would be upgrading as early as possible
anyhow. Is there a symbolic link (or something similar) in the Debian
archive, something like "sarge" -> "oldstable", that I could use here in
place of "stable"?

One way to solve this problem would be to modify your
/etc/apt/sources.list to contain only Sarge ("oldstable") sources and
update aptitude. Then, using aptitude's interactive interface, remove
those "obsolete and locally created packages" that seem to depend upon
non-Sarge resources. Anything from "obsolete and locally created
packages" that seems to be breaking the system should be removed. After
that, confirm that aptitude is happy by doing another "aptitude -sV
upgrade." Aptitude should not want to upgrade anything.

I will try this. Thanks!

You need python (>= 2.4), and that version exists in Etch--which is why
you wanted to mix distributions, but mixing distributions is a great way
to break a Debian system, so you need backports. See if backports.org
has a suitable version of python for you. If not, consider upgrading to
Etch. As a Sarge user, you are not getting security updates, so you
should probably want to upgrade soon anyway.

Installing Debian is very, very painful, and upgrading it is probably not
much better. I downloaded an etch CD image about a year ago, in fact, on
17th May 2007, and started installing it. On 26th May, I got distracted
by something else, and never got back to etch. To install sarge and get
it working acceptably took me 20 days when I didn't have a day job, and
it took me another 7 days of evenings to get my ethernet card working
when I (finally!) got a DSL link. I've kept a blow-by-blow log of
everything I did, so it won't be as bad next time round. But I'm still
not looking forward to it.

BTW, by mixing distributions, you would have problems regardless of
which package manager you used.

Hmm. I don't really feel that it was me that did the mixing. :-)
However, I take the point. I'll try the suggestion you gave me up above
(putting "oldstable" into sources.list), and then report on what
happened.

--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).


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