Potato -> Woody; apt-get snafu..

[Gregory Guthrie <gguthrie@mum.edu>]

I started (over) with a clean system, installed 2.2 from CDroms, added a 
few packages (Apache, ntop, wuftp, gnome,..).

I got several unresolved dependencies reported by dselect, but what to do?

I wanted a few unsupported packages, so I added a ../woody/ line to 
/etc/apt/source/list, and did apt-get update, and dist-upgrade.

Oops; it took about 10 passes to get all the files (220M); many many 400 
not founds, 404 file errors, lost connections, etc. Anyway, a day later all 
was there, and it started updating. At the end it reported a bunch of 
missing dependencies and thus install failures. I ran the cycle again, and 
it downloaded another 20M, and in install gave another bunch of problems. 
Well, after about 5 cycles, it seems to be in such a mess (it now reports 
perl may not be installed properly), that it seems like I need to start all 
over.

What went wrong here?
[I had a similar experience upgrading the sibling machine, but after a few 
cycles it resolved itself.]

I think I didn't do anything wrong, since all I did was to select a few 
dselect packages, and let apt do the work (make a mess..!).

1) Any ideas on how to avoid such snafu's!

2) any ideas for a recovery; or just give up.

3) how stable is woody, on a scale of 0-100%?

4) Can I get only one package from Woody, without upgrading the whole 
distribution?

Thanks,
Gregory Guthrie
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Dr. Gregory Guthrie
gguthrie@mum.edu         (641)472-1125    Fax: -1103
       Computer Science Department
       School of Computing and Information Science
       Maharishi University of Management
      (Maharishi International University 1971-1995)
        http://www.mum.edu/cs_dept
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