Re: dpkg: Update failures
Yang Shouxun <scheme@cmmail.com> wrote:
>Because I'm behind a Wingate, I don't have direct access to http or ftp.
>Someone suggests set http_proxy and ftp_proxy in /etc/environment, but
>that seems to be not working. In a word, I cannot find any hostname in a
>terminal, and apt-get won't work for me. All I do was to manually
>download all the packages required by dependency and ran `dpkg -i
>foo.deb baz.deb' and all troubles came as a result.
>
>I tried to upgrade perl5.6, xfree86-4, mozilla-0.8.1, and netscape-4.76,
>all gave me frustrating experience. Luckily, I worked around the problem
>of updating xfree86-4 by reinstall the Debian/GNU system without
>packages that might conflict with xfree86-4. Yes, that's quite
>expensive. I'm not so lucky with perl5.6, because of circular dependency
>between perl and debconf. I have to compile perl5.6.1 myself and install
>it to /usr/local. When I attempted to upgrade mozilla-M18_3 to
>mozilla-0.8.1 and failed, I made another attempt to install
>netscape-4.76 and found that failed as well. Now the system was left
>with some libraries in a mess.
>
>I really hate the circular dependency in Debian packages. That's really
>frustrating and time-consuming and can render the system in disorder.
Now, imagine what would happen if there weren't such dependencies. You
could just try to upgrade random packages, as you did, and the system
would tell you it had all worked but would then break later ... not
good. I'm sure there are distributions with incomplete dependencies if
that's really what you want.
Oh, by the way, if two packages depend on each other, you can always
just install them both on the same dpkg command line: 'dpkg -i perl.deb
debconf.deb', or whatever. You mention this yourself above, so I'm not
quite sure why you couldn't use this to get around the perl/debconf
problems. The recent upgrades I've performed have all worked fine there.
>Has anybody run into the same problem?
>
>Is there a good way to avoid this?
If you can't get working network access, buy a CD and upgrade from that.
There are plenty of people selling them quite cheaply (see
http://www.debian.org/distrib/vendors).
--
Colin Watson [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]
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