GCC packages fighting amongst themselves?

[Phil Edwards <pedwards@disaster.jaj.com>]

There's probably an easy way out of this mess, but I'm somewhat new
to Debian.  (Been using Linux for years, but just recently switched to
using a distro rather than hacking everything together by hand.)

For a while now I've had both gcc/gcc-2.95 and gcc-3.0 installed; three
packages in all.  I briefly tried uninstalling the gcc/gcc-2.95 packages
(why are there two of them? they're the same thing, aren't they?) but
found that the gcc-3.0 package doesn't use the "alternatives" links to
provide /usr/bin/gcc, etc.

The update_alternatives(8) man page doesn't list any examples of how to
use it, and I didn't feel like single-handedly destroying my system finding
out while experimenting.  :-)  So, back to gcc and gcc-2.95.

But now dselect is constantly signalling conflicts:

    gcc conflicts with gcc-doc (<< 2.95.3)
    gcc-2.95 depends on gcc (>= 2.95.3-2)
    kernel-source-2.2.19 recommends gcc
    kernel-package recommends gcc

And dselect's recommended solution is to uninstall gcc, uninstall gcc-2.95,
uninstall the kernel source, the kernel package, all of KDE and all of
Python -- just so that it can install gcc-doc instead.

"task-devel-common" is what's demanding that gcc-doc be installed.  I played
with deselecting that and half the packages on my system threatened to
uninstall themselves, so I backed off.


Why is 'gcc' conflicting with its own documentation package?  What can I
do to beat it into submission?


(Ironically, the reason I want to get rid of gcc-2.95 entirely and use
only gcc-3.x is that I'm a GCC maintainer, and want to do lots of testing
with the 3.x series.  If the solution to this dependancy mess involves
destroying gcc-doc, that's fine with me; I have many copies of the GCC
manual already.  :-)

Phil

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