Re: Keeping apt-get, dpkg & dselect in sync

[cjw44@cam.ac.uk (Colin Watson)]

Brian Greenfield <bri@zombie.org.uk> wrote:
>I use apt-get to keep this potato box up to date. However, I
>often use dpkg -l to search for packages whose name I'm not
>quite sure of. It was during one of these searches ('dpkg -l
>syslog\*') that I noticed that the packages available
>according to dpkg is different to that of dselect and
>apt-get.
>
>dselect also 'knows' that syslogd isn't an available
>package. How can this be? I understood that dselect and dpkg
>used the same files (those in /var/lib/dpkg/).
>
>How can I get dpkg, dselect and apt all in sync? Should I do
>an update using the apt method of dselect. How else could I
>update dpkg without involving dselect.

As far as I know, you need to do a dselect update to get the available
file that dpkg uses to be updated. You can do this without going into
the dselect interface by typing 'dselect update'. As you correctly
guess, if you do this using dselect's apt method then apt's database
will be updated too, so if you always replace 'apt-get update' by
'dselect update' then everything should work fine.

I'm not entirely convinced this isn't a bug ... it should at least be
documented that you have to do this.

-- 
Colin Watson                                           [cjw44@cam.ac.uk]