Non-existing packages in dselect

[Heikki Vatiainen <hessu@cs.tut.fi>]

Hi all,

I recently jumped from stable to unstable. Just a moment ago I thought about 
installing TeX and it's friends in my system. However dselect lists many 
packages that are not in the tex section of unstable tree. E.g. mflib, mfbin 
are not in unstable but were in stable.

I did not have TeX previously installed.

This made me suspect that there are also other packages listed in dselect that 
were in stable but are not in unstable anymore. I tried experimenting with 
'dpkg --update-avail' which didn't help. After that I tried 'dpkg 
--clear-avail' and finally ended up with zero-length 'available' and 
'available-old' in /var/lib/dpkg.

After that I started dselect and updated the available list. Now everything 
looks good and there are no more old TeX packages visible.

Here's my question: Is this the correct behaviour? Should the available files 
be erased before one changes from e.g. stable to unstable?

// Heikki
-- 
Heikki Vatiainen                  * hessu@cs.tut.fi
Tampere University of Technology  * Tampere, Finland