I have not received any further suggestions about my apt-get problem... http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2003/debian-user-200306/msg02698.html...but I do have a bit more information to add. Just for laughs, I made a minimal fresh woody install (which went very smoothly!) to a free partition on my wife's PC, and looked at the related files on that machine. Attached is a bzipped tar archive containing the sources.list, cdroms.list and a directory listing of /var/lib/apt/lists, which the interested reader could compare with those I posted previously. As you will see, I also edited the sources.list on that install (adding the security URL's), but this time, apt-get kept on working.
My guess is that upgrading from potato has somehow screwed up the way apt-get handles cdroms. I did follow the instructions, commenting out everything in my sources-list before running apt-cdrom to add all 14 of the disks in my distribution, but a look at the resulting cdroms.list on my machine shows two things:
1) The 6 old cdroms from the potato installation are still remembered, despite having been removed from my sources.list. 2) The format of cdroms.list seems to have altered between potato and woody. Note that every CD is repeated with a '::Label' line in the working system, whereas on my broken system, only the last CD to be read in has this line present. Also on my system there are a bunch of empty '::Label' lines after the last CD.
Furthermore, on the working installation, the /var/lib/apt/lists directory contains 59 files, including 2 from security.debian.org, whereas on my broken machine, the directory is empty, apart from one 'lock' file.
So, before I give up and just do a clean install, I guess I will try to fix this last (?) update-related problem, but I would appreciate some information from those in the know:
-> How do I clean up the apt-cdrom and apt-get databases, so that I can do a fresh run of apt-cdrom and get things looking way they should be?
-> Are there any other known problems/issues with updating to woody from potato, apart from the three that I have reported so far?
-- Cheers, .~. /V\ // \\ /( )\ ^`~´^ < hugge >
Attachment:
cdrom_problem.bz2
Description: Binary data