Re: package management
On Sat, Apr 13, 2002 at 05:28:49AM -0700, David Wright wrote:
> Okay, I have calmed down a bit since I sent my "kill, kill, kill" mail,
> and now have some more rationally formulated questions about package
> management.
>
> 1) Is there any way to force dpkg to remove as much of a package as it
> can and then liquidate the entry from its database, regardless of
> whatever error codes any scripts return, thus allowing you to start over
> from a pristine pre-install state? Something like
> dpkg --force-do-it-or-else --remove PackageName
Stick 'exit 0' on the second line of the postrm script
(/var/lib/dpkg/info/packagename.postrm).
The various --force options are listed in 'dpkg --force-help'. I don't
think ignoring errors from postrm scripts is among them (perhaps it
should be, I don't know).
> 2) Is there any way to tell dpkg to mark a specific package with a hold
> flag without going through the dselect menus? I always end up getting
> lost and doing things I don't want to in dselect, and I really want to
> be able to just type something like
> dpkg --flag hold PackageName
> at the command line.
echo packagename hold | dpkg --set-selections
> 3) Is there any way to export the entire package database from one
> machine and then tell another machine to install exactly those packages
> (i.e. not only install the missing ones but also remove the extra ones)?
> Again, I would like to avoid the dselect interface like the plague.
dpkg --get-selections \* > selections
# move the selections file to the other machine
dpkg --set-selections < selections
dselect install remove
# no, this doesn't put you into the dselect interface itself
Giving the \* argument to dpkg --get-selections causes it to list all
packages, including purged ones.
> 4) It seems that sometimes packages get into a "deselect ok installed"
> state from which it is impossible to do anyting. Is these some way to
> force-change the associated flags?
'deselect ok installed' means that it's installed but you want to remove
it. What problems are you having?
(It's possible to edit /var/lib/dpkg/status to change state flags, but
really don't do that unless you already know everything about what
you're doing.)
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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