Re: newbie's question: how to undo dselect
On 4 Jun 2003 Robert Fu <qrobertfu@yahoo.com> wrote:
> I'm a newbie to Debian Linux. Somehow I made a mistake, and now whenever I
> run dselect, it'll try to uninstall about 200 KDE packages. Thus I cannot
> install or remove any package without risk of messing up the whole system.
I ran into the same problem last year.
> It seems to be a lot of work to manually re-select the 200 KDE packages in
> dselect. I hope there is way to reset package selection in dselect so that
> I can keep current installed packages and install new packages. I did some
> search, and cannot find a solution.
I could not either.
> I saw somebody submitted Bug#35639: dpkg: No undo for operations in
> dselect
> (http://lists.debian.org/debian-dpkg/1999/debian-dpkg-199904/msg00009.html).
> It seems the bug was closed without any code changes.
Probably what we both dream of, a command to force the package management
system to clean up a dependencies mess while retaining most if not all of
the packages we need, is just too tall an order.
> Does anyone know how to undo dselect after mistakes are made in previous
> execution of dselect?
Unfortunately, I do not. In the end, what I did was back up all user data,
configuration files, downloaded programs and the like, reinstalled Linux
from scratch, restored the backed up data, and never used dselect again
as anything else than a tool to VIEW information on packages.
The commands I use the most for package management are apt-get, apt-cache,
dpkg and dpkg-deb. The number of flags and options you have to remember is
a bit annoying, but you have more control over what happens than with
dselect.
But I would be still be grateful if some wizard were to reveal that there
IS a powerful 'packages clean up' command after all.
Ben
--
B.F.M. Kal
Anjelierstraat 1, 2014 TC Haarlem, Netherlands
tel +31 23 5324909, benkal@euronet.nl
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