Re: apt-get still broken
Peter Hugosson-Miller wrote:
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?
The latest is that I filed a bug report against apt
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=198730 and have
received help from the package maintainer which appears to solve 95% of
the problem.
The error messages go away, at least, though there is still the open
question about the cdroms.list file, which seems to be a bit broken.
Maybe it doesn't matter ;-).
The problem seems to be that apt-cdrom has changed where it keeps some
of its files. As I used the potato version of apt-cdrom to read in the
woody cd's, when I did the recommended 'apt-get install dpkg apt
debconf' step of the upgrade, apt-cdrom sawed off the branch it was
standing on when it upgraded itself, so to speak, and lost knowledge of
the cd's it had read in in its old incarnation.
I suggested that a statically compiled version of apt be created, so
that it could be installed without dragging a mess of other packages
with it. This version could then be used for dist-upgrades, to avoid
this kind of problem. Anyone else think this is a good idea? Or if it's
a bad idea, mind explaining why?
--
Cheers,
.~.
/V\
// \\
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^`~´^
< hugge >
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