Re: FOUND IT!!! was Re: Problems with dselect...

[Dale Scheetz <dwarf@polaris.net>]

On Wed, 17 Mar 1999, Santiago Vila wrote:

> On Tue, 16 Mar 1999, Dale Scheetz wrote:
> 
> > Well, I found the problem. The problem is with dpkg-http, which
> > pre-depends on libhtml-parser-perl, and depends on libwww-perl. These are
> > all optional packages!
> > 
> > Isn't it a mistake to pre-depend upon optional packages?
> 
> A Pre-depend on an optional package is not a mistake as such (provided
> the Pre-Depend itself is jutified enough, of course).
> 
> It would be a mistake if the package were of standard priority or higher,
> because a package may not depend on another one of lower priotity.

I thought that there were more restrictions than that, like the
pre-depended upon package should have some hope of already being
installed, which isn't the case here. Also, it isn't clear that the
predepends is needed at all.

I tried to modify the .deb file by extracting the control file, changing
the pre-depends to a depends and then 'ar -r dpkg-http....deb
control.tar.gs' to put the control file back into the .deb. The problem is
that dpkg-deb now complains that the file is not a debian archive. Is
there some order issue that I messed up? What is the proper order for the
elements of a .deb file?

> 
> > In any case it seems that dselect finds all the depends and pre-depends
> > (and identifies each properly) but fails to deal with it, and passes dpkg
> > an impossible situation, leading to the error messages.
> > 
> > With this out of the way, I still can't install all packages at once. This
> > is caused by the fact that dselect wishes to install a bunch of perl
> > add-on packages before perl has been installed, dying with "too many
> > errors" which blocks further progress. [...]
> 
> The "too many errors" is a bug in dpkg. There is a very simple patch
> available. I suggest the dpkg maintainers to apply it.

For me, the simpler solution was to move perl to the 'base' section. This
causes it to be unpacked before the packages that depend upon it, and I
can start with a base install and select all of the packages on the CD and
the installation successfully runs to completion in one pass!

Luck,

Dwarf
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