dependancy hell due to segfault advice?
I am in the process of upgrading some potato machines to
woody. I've done probably 2-3 dozen upgrades in the past
without a glitch. this machine had one though. while
unpacking perl-modules apt-get or dpkg or something
segfaulted and the upgrade aborted.
trying to recover gracefully failed because there was
about a dozen packages in dependency loops, perl wouldn't
install because it conflicted with the old perl, and it
wouldn't downgrade, libc6 wouldn't install for some reaosn,
and a bunchmore ....
eventually I think i worked around, unfortunately I had
to do a bunch of dpkg -i --force-depends to get the packages
to install, but I resolved all of the dependencies and
am in the process of resuming the dist-upgrade with no
further problems sofar.
it was kinda scary. I think it is because of a bad memory
chip, in another system that has the exact same hardware
openbsd refused to upgrade(well it crashed while compiling
sources).
so I think i know what the problem is, but my question is
whats a good way to recover from such an error? That is,
when I can't really afford to wait a few hours for
mailing list replies, I think what I did was pretty safe,
everything is working ont he system, the dist-upgrade
completed without any further errors, no packages left
in limbo..If something breaks I can always schedule
downtime for the system to reinstall it if it came
to that.
I was just, for some reason sort of suprised that since
apt-get broke(due to memory fault), it was unable to
recover. despite my best efforts to recover gracefully
nothing would instal without using the force option.
and the crash occured very soon after the upgrade
started, since libc6 hadn't even been installed yet.
infact apt-get was totally useless until I had
manually solved the dependency problems with dpkg.
I was sort of expecting for apt-get to just continue
where it left off.
nate
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