dbugging dselect

[David Stern <dstern@u.washington.edu>]

Hi,

I'm having troubles with dselect in slink.  I tried addressing this 
issue in debian-user, but got absoutely no response, so I thought I'd 
try here.  I haven't been on this list for long, so if this is in any 
way inappropriate, I apologize.  I'm very grateful to and have great 
respect for all the developers.

A big part of the difficulty for me is figuring out exactly what 
problem I have. What happened was that when I tried to update my 
packages the other
night using dselect, a number of packages, mostly perl and pam, had 
errors.  Now dselect is stuck.  I can update the packages file, I can 
switch to another install method, but when it comes to running install, 
no go.

I've been stumbling around in bug tracking, and I successfully applied 
one "quick fix" (export PERL5LIB=/usr/lib/perl5), which bought me 
updating my available packages and changing access methods, but I still 
can't install.

If this is waiting for a fix, I don't mind waiting, I just want to know 
what I should be keeping an eye open for when a fix becomes available.  
 It's been a good number of days now.  OTOH, if I need to download some 
packages and manually install em, then I'd like to have at it.  You 
see..

  install attempt in dselect error message:
  -----------------------------------------
  [..unmet dependencies, blah, blah.. ]
  dependencies:
    perl-suid: Depends:perl
    libpam0: Depends:libpam0g
    perl: Depends:perl-base

Thanks,

David