Re: dist-upgrade problem with conflicting packages coreutils and shellutils
On Tue, 1 Oct 2002 22:11:26 +0200, Gerhard Gaussling <ggrubbish@web.de> wrote:
> Yes, it's longer ago I wanted to install a package from source. I
> don't remember what kind of source-tarball I installed by using
> auto-apt, but it was a developer version, the newest available.
Ok, but learn how to build debs from the debian sources, and it will
come in handy. Remember you will first need to fetch the build
dependencies for the package you are trying to build.
> I configured my preferences woody pin-priority to 777 and sid
> pin-priority 333. I can't remember exactly, but I installed that
> package on woody.
>
> Last weeken I tried to upgade my woody distribution to sarge due to
> a few problems I had to implement packages from unstable. I thought
> that the differences between woody and sid are getting bigger and
> bigger, though it seemed to me that it'll be no longer an good idea
> to stick with woody if I need packages from sid.
Right. Though you could probably compile sid sources on woody, at
least for a while (this the divergence becomes great).
> But I made mistakes with my preparation of the dist-upgrade. I left
> the pin-prioritys in the preferences and only changed woody to
> testing.
>
> After ran into the problems with coreutils from sid I had
> overwritten the woody packages of textutils and shellutils. (I
> think fileutils were updated before coreutils. Unfortunateley
> textutils and shellutils were upgraded after coreutils).
>
> Later I gave tesing 1001 and unstable 99. with that
> preferences-file I downgraded all packages from sid to sarge.
>
> I think that was the recommendet action _before_ using dpkg
> --force-overwrite :-(
Actually, I think downgrading is not officially supported.
> Unfortunateley it seems that the coreutils-package couldn't be
> downgraded.
>
> And now I'm in a situation where I have too versions of packages
> that provides the coreutils:
>
> coreutils from sid on one side (but overwritten with the
> sarge-packages, but still marked as installed in the apt-database)
> and
> fileutils, shellutils, textutils from sarge
>
> But my system runs normal
> How can I directly see that I have to do with a _base_ -package,
> like libc6 or coreutils?
Use the grep-dctrl package. Example, to see all packages with priority
required do
grep-available -Fpriority required -sPackage | less
and you get a list of packages you don't want to mess with. Never try
to upgrade these packages to the unstable version if you are running
testing. You might also want to back off packages with priority
important.
See http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#s2.2 for
more information about Priorities.
> I think with my preferences-file:
>
> Package: *
> Pin: release a=testing
> Pin-Priority:1001
>
> Package: *
> Pin: release a=unstable
> Pin-Priority: 99
>
> I had backtracked my system to testing already.
Looks like that. I'd now change it to something like what I have,
though. You don't need to pin testing if you are running testing by
default.
> Well, I'll gonna live with this situation probably till the moment
> one package of sid or a source-tarball _really_ needs the binarys
> from coreutils and _not_ shellutils or the other utils from sarge
> I'll probably run into problems, maybe not ...
Yes, I don't think there is much else you can do at this point. If you
run into serious problems later you will just have to reinstall.
Faheem.
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