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



On Wed, 17 Mar 1999, Dale Scheetz wrote:

> On Wed, 17 Mar 1999, Santiago Vila wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 16 Mar 1999, Dale Scheetz wrote:
> > > 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.

The only restriction is that pre-depends are rarely used, and they need
the approval of debian-devel before using them.

> Also, it isn't clear that the predepends is needed at all.

I assume the maintainer asked debian-devel before adding the dependency.
You may ask the maintainer about the reason.

> 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?

It is already reported as a bug that a .deb may not be built directly by
using ar, so this is known.

You may try to use standard tools, like dpkg-deb.
The dpkg-repack tool may help also.

> > > 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!

I guess this should be also solved by using a dselect method that
does package ordering.

Thanks.

-- 
 "9703ab793519f720f920a00a933d5728" (a truly random sig)


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