Re: dist-upgrade problem with conflicting packages coreutils and shellutils
On Mon, 30 Sep 2002 21:26:04 +0200, Gerhard Gaussling <ggrubbish@web.de> wrote:
> debian:/usr/src# apt-get remove coreutils
> Reading Package Lists... Done
> Building Dependency Tree... Done
> The following packages will be REMOVED:
> coreutils
> WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed
> This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you are doing!
> coreutils
> 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not
> upgraded.
> Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 5329kB will be freed.
> You are about to do something potentially harmful
> To continue type in the phrase 'Yes, do as I say!'
> ?] n
> Abort.
>
> This seems to be not a good idea. Maybe apt-get and debconf depends
> on the utilitys, and if they are removed I'll maybe no longer able
> to reinstall textutils, shellutils and fileutils.
Agreed.
Ok, here is the deal. I am not completely sure on the details, but it
appears that you had apt misconfigured, since the coreutils binary is
currently only in unstable, and apt never should have tried to install
it. I'm tracking sarge and I don't have it installed. So the first
priority is to figure out why this happened and make sure it doesn't
happen again. Stuff from unstable, particularly basic stuff, is not
guaranteed to play nice with stuff in testing/stable.
Ok, so what to do? Well you have two choices.
1) Backtrack to testing completely. Risky, and not guaranteed to work.
2) Do nothing and continue to track sarge, making sure that you are in
fact tracking sarge. This is probably your best option, assuming that
your system is working normally. At some point sarge will catch up to
the current packages in unstable, and coreutils will come in to sarge,
and at that point hopefully if there are any residual problems, they
will be resolved. If not, well, you should cross that bridge when you
come to it.
So the questions are
1) Is your system working normally?
2) What is the problems with your apt-sources? My current apt
sources are
***************************************************************
# See sources.list(5) for more information, especialy
# Remember that you can only use http, ftp or file URIs
# CDROMs are managed through the apt-cdrom tool.
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ sarge main non-free contrib
deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ sarge main non-free contrib
deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US sarge/non-US main contrib non-free
deb-src http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US sarge/non-US main
contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ woody/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main non-free contrib
deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main non-free contrib
deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US unstable/non-US main contrib non-free
deb-src http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US unstable/non-US main
contrib non-free
****************************************************************
and /etc/apt/preferences are
*************************
Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 50
*************************
and these work Ok for me. Maybe there is a problem with your
preferences setting. I am sure people here would be happy to advise
you about this.
Faheem.
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