Re: How to find out apt-get's reasoning

[Travis Crump <pretzalz@techhouse.org>]

Jonathan Matthews wrote:
> Having just installed the Gnome 2.2 backport, I'm trying to drop kde 
> from my box totally.  Never liked the "underline the desktop icons" 
> thing anyway[1] :-)
>
> I thought I'd got it all out, but witness the following:
>
> bigdaddy:/home/jaycee# apt-get dist-upgrade -u
> [snip]
> The following NEW packages will be installed:
>   kdelibs-data 
> The following packages have been kept back
>   gnu-smalltalk imagemagick libcurl2 liblcms1 liblcms1-dev libmng-dev 
> libmng1 libpng12-0 libpng12-0-dev libpng3 libwmf0.2-7
>   mpeglib tetrinetx 
> 0 packages upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 13  not 
> upgraded.
>
> I'm not asking anyone to tell me why my particular mix of sources is 
> doing this, I'm wondering more if there's a grep-available or grep-dctrl 
> invocation that might tell me which *installed* packages *depend* on 
> kdelibs-data.  Yes, I know "kdelibs & kdelibs4", but neither of them is 
> installed.

The more likely cause of this behavior is the "Replaces" field of 
kdelibs-data.  I think apt-get will automatically try to install on 
dist-upgrade any package that claims to replace an installed package. 
Check out:

for i in `grep-available -PX kdelibs-data -n -s Replaces | sed -e 
's/([^(]*)//g' -e 's/,//g'`; do grep-status -PX $i | grep-dctrl -FStatus 
'install ok installed' -s Package; done

though it would probably be easier to just check each package in the 
Replaces field by hand than figure out that expression. :)