Re: Help debugging package problems (again)

[Bill Moseley <moseley@hank.org>]

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On Sun, 2 Feb 2003, Faheem Mitha wrote:

> > ii  libc6               2.3.1-9             GNU C Library: Shared libraries and Timezone data
> 
> As I am sure hordes of people will shortly tell you, you have upgraded
> to the libc6 in unstable. In general, not such a great idea. Now some
> of the packages in testing are going to be uninstallable for you, and
> you may have other problems. Be careful about upgrading packages from
> unstable. In general you don't want to upgrade base packages,
> particularly libc and c++ libraries and perl. locales in testing
> depends on a particular value of libc6

That's probably what happened.  So a program has a bug fix or a feature
that's required and it's in unstable what options do I have?

> In some cases it is possible to recompile packages from unstable
> locally, and it this is possible, do it. But they might have too many
> dependencies that are only in unstable for such an approach to be
> practical. The new apt-src by Joey Hess (only in unstable currently)
> might help with that.

I'll take a look.  At some point it almost seems easier to just build from
source.  I've been trying to avoid that as much as possible.  But maybe
it's worse to break things my mixing up testing and unstable.

> You might try downgrading libc to testing. Warning: this might break
> your system. Apt-get will give you horrible warnings if you try to do
> this, but if your system is still mostly testing, it may well
> work. Try
> 
> apt-get install libc6/testing

Using apt-get -s install libc6/testing says it's going to remove over 200
packages.  

bumby:~# dpkg -l | grep ^ii | wc -l
    487
bumby:~# apt-get -s install libc6/testing | grep Remv | wc -l
    219


Doesn't make sense.  It's removing packages that are in testing.  For
example:

Remv aumix-gtk (2.7-26 Debian:testing)

I think that downgrade would really break things


I guess I just wish the error messages were more clear.  For example:

bumby:~# apt-get -s dist-upgrade
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Calculating Upgrade... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  wine 
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libexif8 libssl0.9.7 
The following packages have been kept back
  jpilot jpilot-plugins libfontconfig1 libfontconfig1-dev libpisock++0
libpisock8 libscrollkeeper0 pilot-link scrollkeeper sylpheed-claws 
26 packages upgraded, 2 newly installed, 1 to remove and 10  not upgraded.
Remv wine (0.0.20020904-1 Debian:testing)

I don't see why wine needs to be removed.  I assume the packages that are
to be kept back are because those are from unstable and the testing
versions are a lower version.




-- 
Bill Moseley moseley@hank.org