Re: apt-get wants to upgrade package to same version?
On Tue, Aug 27, 2002 at 02:36:39PM +0100, Scott James Remnant wrote:
> The pins are used to determine which of all the available versions for
> the package are candidates for installation, in Ludovic's case both the
> woody and unstable versions are candidates (both have pin > now).
In my case, though one PIN is -1 The other PIN is 700.
The entry with the PIN of -1 is wrong, but it is obvious that apt-get
must be using it somehow, as then entry with the PIN of 700 is
identical.
The -1 entry isn't even installable on my system, it requires
the latest version of libc6 which I do not have installed on my
system.
If apt-get was ignoring the PIN entry of -1 like it should, there would
be no reason for it to reinstall those packages again.
When apt-get does install the package, it correctly uses the PIN=700
entry. It is only when apt-get checks to see if it needs to be
reinstalled, it somehow gets this wrong. It then proceeds to reinstall
the same version again.
> Once that's done, you have a list of candidate versions. First the
> highest version will be selected, in Ludovic's they both have the same
> version, so they're both selected.
>
> Now the version listed first in the sources.list is selected, because
> that's your most preferred source.
errr.... I already said that the first entry in ***my*** sources.list
has a PIN of -1. Why do I feel like I am going around in circles here?
> There's no assumption going on here about the content of the package,
> it's simply selecting which of the available packages you mean it to
> download.
I think you are mistaken.
Even if apt-get could select the correct package entry correctly, there
is still the problem that both packages would have the same name and
apt-get would try to store them both in the one directory.
Even if apt-get did everything correctly, you still might have the
problem of caches along the way getting confused.
Which is probably a more fundemental flaw in Debian, as it has no
concept of namespaces, or that various versions of the one compiled
binary might exist. Currently if you modify the binary, you must also
modify to source to use a different version.
--
Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>
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