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Re: apt-get distupgrade wants to remove my whole system

Steven Satelle wrote:

This is a resend (I'm not sure mails from my gmail account are reaching
the list).
I'm running testing and have been happily for the last few months. No
real problems, updating every few days by doing an apt-get
distupgrade. Yesterday I saw the package upgrade-system in the available list and decided to install it. I installed and ran it, it said it wanted to downgrade 20 packages and remove over a thousand, including 20 essentials, such as apt. Since then no matter what frontend I run - apt-get, aptitude, synaptic, they all want to remove essentially my entire system. I've tried runnning dpkg --forget-available and re-updating my package lists a few times but they always want to remove everything. Has something changed on the servers? or is it the upgrade-system 
command that has messed up my system?
How can I stop this?
Is my only option to allow it to remove everything and then reinstall?




Maybe you can post what it is saying it wants to do..
Also, you could use aptitude and try to find out what's going on with that program (it may show what's the reason all those tools are about to be uninstalled) - look at the essential packages for a start;
Also -- do you use apt-get pinning or something like that? Or maybe you used a lot of backports before you made the jump to sarge, that might explain this; just guessing though 
Maybe you should create /etc/apt/preferences with contents like:

	Package: *
	Pin: release a=stable
	Pin-Priority: 60

	Package: *
	Pin: release a=testing
	Pin-Priority: 1001

	Package: *
	Pin: release a=unstable
	Pin-Priority: 50
(ok I copied that from a webpage and switched the stable and testing priorities as you want a testing environment right?) Though I don't know - maybe you should remove that again when sarge becomes stable.. 

HTH,

Joris
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