Re: forcing dselect to downgrade

[Tommy <tjm1@thorn.net>]

Stephen Pitts wrote:

> >
> You don't. Downgrading packages has undefined results. A better option would be to
> tell the list about your problems and we'll help you fix them
> --

 Currently dselect marks 90% of the package on my system as broken. And
there are a lot of them.  I tried switching to exim from smail, just to
try it. I have constant error messages.  Several aps/ games like quake
no longer run when not in X and I can not seem to find the requested
libraries or get them installed.  Fetchmail does not work  Most things
on the box seem to work fine, but the whole thing seems a little whacked

In the hope that my errors will not be repeated by other I will endure
the embarrassment of explaining how this happened. My system was running
fine off  the packages is on my Debian 2.0 cdrom.  I decided to upgrade
some of the packages via ftp.  When I upgraded the package lists  of 
stable, unstable, contrib, and non-free dselect presumed that I wanted
to upgrade everything on my system.  That everything I had previously
installed that had a newer package available was selected for install
and included in the download list.  

This created a serious problem for me because I need the packaging
system to warn me about dependencies.  If I cancel the download and try
to install individual packages via dpkg the required packages will
already be marked as selected and no dependency warnings will be given.  

I tried getting part of the list of aps I wanted to upgrade, but got a
ton of error messages for the reasons just cited.  Not knowing what else
to do I decided to get everything that had been selected.  I must say
I'm kind of ashamed of this since I really do know better than to hog an
ftp site like that, but I really did not know what else to do.

Needless to say lots of errors occur when you try to ftp hundreds of mgs
of  files. Now dselect say 90% of my packages are broken. Far to many to
fix one at a time using dpkg.  I feel as if I have lost control of my
system.  I would like to get control back.  Any help is greatly
appreciated.  Thank You