Re: The Thrill of Debian Gnu/Linux
John McBride <jmcbride@networkone.net> wrote:
>As soon as I got a base system working, I updated my sources.list and
>used "apt-get update". It failed after retreiving the pkg files with an
>E: message that some package names were too long. Presumably, my 2.1
>slink CD has a version of dpkg or something that has some kind of path
>length limitation.
I don't see anything obvious in the changelog, but I might be missing
something; it's worth asking debian-testing about this (in case it's a
bug in potato too).
>Since dpkg/apt failed due to some file length error, I tried to update
>them by hand (dpkg). I found some kind of circular dependency between
>libc6 and the newer apt/dpkg, so I ended up forcibly installing one of
>them. Finally, I got past the name length error, and apt-get started
>working again, but part of the way through the update it crashed, and
>when I rebooted it started giving some kind of "E: pre depends" message
>when it worked through the dependency list. Several people have posted
>to deja.com about it.
That *is* a problem. If you see this again, it would be good to get the
output of 'dpkg -s libc6', 'dpkg -s dpkg' and 'dpkg -s apt' before and
after the installation. Where on Deja was this?
>Ha, I left one out -- if you have a DRDOS partition, cfdisk and lilo
>conspire to mangle it. Doesn't happen under RedHat.
Have a look in the bug tracking system (http://bugs.debian.org/) for
reports against cfdisk and lilo. If it's not mentioned, use 'reportbug'
to file a bug. On the whole, Debian package maintainers really are
receptive and responsive to bugs, and I've usually found it worth the
effort of putting together bug reports.
--
Colin Watson [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]
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