none
Hi, glad to see there is some traffic here again, it is always
interesting reading. I have something to relate however, that
might be of interest to those on this list.
This message concerns only the recoverability of the package
configuration after something catastrophic.
About two months ago, I ran out of hard drive space on my linux
partition. Being thrifty, I moved my cumbersome news and mail
files to my dos partition, which was about 1 gig. This, however,
didn't work long, as mh didn't appreciate that (long story).
So, after the end of the semester, I backed up my dos files onto
a small hard drive I had in a crate. I then formatted the dos
partition as ext2, with the intention of moving everything to
that partition, and using the smaller partition for dos.
I made a mistake. When copying, I used cp -r -d, without the
-p flag, and though everything worked, my user account didn't
get to access any files in the home directory. Ok, fine, I
went back, and did the right thing, then discovered, to my
dismay, that somehow all the dpkg configuration files vanished,
and that, try as I might, I couldn't get them back. Of course, I
did a lot of lilo'ing and emacs /etc/lilo.conf to get the correct
root directories to load, etc. I finally got dpkg to work by
mkdir'ing and touch'ing all the files and directories that it was
looking for, and extracting the control info for the specific
packages that I was playing with into the appropriate directory.
I'm not complaining, the linux that I tried before debian was
crap, and I like the new logo, but I think that the package
utilities should be smart enough to repair the /var/lib/dpkg
heirarchy to the extent that any particular session of dpkg
needs to install itself. I know what that really means is that
I should figure out how to restore the silly thing myself, heh,
when it thinks that I don't have anything installed now and I
don't want a bunch of scripts installed on top of all my custom
stuff :)
I guess the up side is that I sat down and figured out how to use
all this software in the past few weeks, everything from a real
live on the fly customizable network server with boa off of floppies
to play with at work to using the isapnptools to set up my sound
card so that I could move my cdrom off the main board and put in
a backup hard drive.
There probably is some way to get dpkg to right itself, but I
haven't found it yet.
Yet another long night,
Chris Rhodes
--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-admintool-request@lists.debian.org .
Trouble? e-mail to templin@bucknell.edu .
Reply to: