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Re: What is state of package installed despite dependencies?



On Sun, Jun 24, 2001 at 05:04:22AM +0200, Joost Kooij wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 23, 2001 at 09:28:49AM -0700, Ross Boylan wrote:
[snip]
> > 2) like 1, with dselect.
> 
> Dselect will tell you what you will be doing before you do it.  Then it
> will do the apt-get thing anyway.
> 

apt-get also tells what it's about to do and then asks for a confirm.
For extra safety, apt-get -s will do a dry (no action) run.

> > 3) Use apt-get's new pin feature (-t) after editing sources list.  The 
> > problem is that if I want this on an ongoing basis I need to add unstable 
> > to sources list, leaving woody there (1+2 just replace it).  Then I need to 
> > set some option in apt.conf to pin woody, and then override it on the 
> > command line for sid.  Finally, because I have a longer sources list, every 
> > apt-get update over a modem would take longer.  If I restore my 
> > sources.list, this ends up being like 1+2, only more work.
> 
> I'm not familiar with it.  Surely if the feature is new then you will
> have to install packages from unstable to begin with.  Oh well.
It's only relatively new.  woody has it.
> 
> > 4) apt-get source and build/install.
> 
> That feature of apt-get I just love.  
For this particular package (gtoaster) some of the depends and build
depends seem problematic: apt-get build-dep gtoaster resulted in quite
a few packages being REmoved (if I had not bailed out when it asked
for a confirm).  So I think I'll just stick in the past.

Unfortunately, turning back the clock with gtoaster is problematic.
The upgrade rewrites the configuration files it ways it warns may
break backward compatibility.  I though purging the package would fix
this, but the offending file is in each user's space (.gtoasterrc) and
so doesn't get cleaned out.  

I tried rm the file, but it seems to have reverted back to the newer
version (that is, the unstable version).  I may have deleted the wrong
file (e.g., my personal one, though I run gtoaster as root), so that
rm might be sufficient.  Or maybe there's something more.

The code that fiddles with the configuration is in the program, not
the debian control scripts, by the way.

> 
> > So I thought I'd try just installing the deb.  As I said, I thought the 
> > version dependency checking happened at the dpkg level.
> 
> Yes, but dpkg looks only one step ahead.  Apt-get can look more steps
> ahead and walk dpkg around.  Dselect gives you an overview before you
> set off.

dpkg seemed to do more like half a step: it removed the old version,
unpacked the new version, and then at configuration discovered there
were missing dependencies and bailed out.

> 
> Cheers,
> 
> 
> Joost

Thanks for the help.



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