Aptitude - Removing Unwanted Holds

[arlie@worldash.org (Arlie Stephens)]

For some bizarre reason, aptitude seems extremely fond of holding
packages at prior versions. This has resulted in at least one csae of
my system being afflicted by a known - and fixed - bug.

I use aptitude in its curses based gui mode. I typically do 'u',
to find out what new versions are available, possibly followed by 
selecting some specific new application I've decided I want - or
rejecting one of more apps I got by default. Then I do 'g', and get a
huge list of packages which 'could be upgraded but are being held
back'. I go through those selecting +, and hit g again. 

This kind-of, sort-of works. It is far too manual for my tastes. 
Moreover, it seems as if it doesn't even mention some upgradeable
packages - unless kdelibs has advanced by 2 versions since Friday, 
fixing a bug that was discussed (as already fixed) on this list on
Saturday. kdelibs was upgradeable but held today - and I know I'd 
looked specifically at it on Friday, given the problems Iw as trying
to fix.

I've seen a bunch of mention of aptitude commands that tell it to
forget various things, but I'm not finding a way to tell it to forget
all "holds". Is there any simple way to do this?

Second question - has anyone got any idea why it keeps hallucinating
holds I never requested? I suspect there's something bizarre about the
(company internal) package repository I'm using, and/or perhaps some 
package I haven't noticed yet is doing something I don't want (perhaps
using other packaging tools), but I may be completely wrong. 

-- 
Arlie

(Arlie Stephens	                              arlie@worldash.org)