aptitude is blowing up again.

[Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net>]

greetings all;

I very carefully selected  docs, x11, kde and xfce to be installed on 
this rock64. That was something over 2000 packages when I hit the g. 
There was a bare jessie image, a little under 3.5 GB on the sdcard at 
that point, around 20:00 last night. 32GB sdcard. aptitude just keeps 
selecting previously unselected stuff, that sdcard is now at 80%, 
working extremely slowly and apparently nowhere near done. I suspect it 
will die, out of disk space, perhaps next Wednesday at 3 AM, if I don't 
unplug it first.

rock64@rock64:~$ df
Filesystem     1K-blocks     Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mmcblk1p7  30299144 23181512   5846304  80% /

htop, on a separate login screen says its not any sort of resource 
constrained and is not using any swap. All of its ncurses gfx have 
disappeared, and I am looking at dpkg output in my login shell as it 
seems bound and determined to install the whole debian arm64 repo for 
jessie. And it has not yet installed synaptic-pkexec.

So how _do_ you control this application?

I'm at this point, ready to re-write that image to a 64GB sdcard, and 
spend days using apt to pull stuff I need in one package at a time. I 
know you cannot remove a package with it, because its interpretation of 
dependencies will leave you with an unbootable, destroyed system. Its 
done that to me several times already.

So when do we get a default, just works, does _only_ what you ask it to, 
text/ncurses based package manager with a bare bones arm64 install? 
Something you can actually build a working system with?

Sigh.

While I am up on my soapbox about this, that set of html docs on aptitude 
someone pointed me at, is that available in a printable pdf? Link plz if 
it is.

Thanks.

-- 
Cheers, Gene Heskett
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>