Re: APT Issues & Still Updating ETCH After Changing Sources.List To Unstable

[Florian Kulzer <florian@molphys.leidenuniv.nl>]

On Sat, Jun 10, 2006 at 12:18:29 -0700, Christopher Nelson wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 10, 2006 at 05:48:54PM +0200, Florian Kulzer wrote:
> > On Sat, Jun 10, 2006 at 07:01:47 -0700, Leonard Chatagnier wrote:
>   <snip>
> > >                                                Also
> > > simulated an apt-get upgrade and dist-upgrade also
> > > with aptitude and couldn't see anything about GPG or
> > > DiffIndex. Aptitude wants to remove as unused some 687
> > > packages that are critical to me such as all of kde,
> > > java, all of apt, all of mozilla, etc, etc. Although
> > > Debian recommends aptitude as handling dependencies
> > > better than apt-get, I find it problematic and that it
> > > creates more issues than it solves unless there is
> > > some underlying secret in using it that I'm not aware
> > > of.
>   <snip>
> > 3. Use aptitude interactively to check the "Obsolete and Locally Created
> >    Packages" section. Most packages in there should probably be removed
> >    for the upgrade, including the Etch versions of the multimedia
> >    packages.
> > 
> > 4. aptitude dist-upgrade (This should now work without removing all
> >    those important packages.)
> 
> I think the OP problem wasn't conflicts arising from testing versions of
> packages, but likely that aptitude wasn't used to set up the base
> system, but rather apt-get or a different package tool, and therefore
> (as on my system) aptitude thinks that all packages not
> required/standard were installed by some other package which no longer
> in installed and therefore they should be removed.  While it would be
> possible to mark all the metapackage etc. as manually installed, that is
> a lot more work than using apt-get/already learned tool--may or may not
> be worth it, but it is more work.

I thought that aptitude only keeps track of packages which were
installed by aptitude itself to fulfill dependencies; these are marked
as auto-installed ("A") in aptitude's internal database and can be
removed automatically if no other packages depend on them anymore:

/usr/share/doc/aptitude/html/en/ch02s02s07.html

I have many libraries which are not marked as auto; they were all
installed as dependencies when I still used apt-get:

$ aptitude search '~i!~M~n^lib' | wc -l
611

Therefore I don't think that you have to do anything to keep aptitude
from removing what you previously installed with apt-get. (On the other
hand, I probably should at least do "aptitude markauto '~slibs'" to mark
all libraries as auto-installed.)

-- 
Regards,
          Florian