Re: xlibs in etch

["Kevin B. McCarty" <kmccarty@Princeton.EDU>]

Someone anonymous wrote:

> I recently upgraded from sarge to etch, and I have been able to 
> get almost everything working, but I tried to upgrade to a newer 
> version of vlc, and it says:
> ---
> The following packages are BROKEN:
>   vlc wxvlc
> 0 packages upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
> Need to get 3237kB of archives. After unpacking 9294kB will be used.
> The following packages have unmet dependencies:
>   wxvlc: Depends: xlibs (> 4.1.0) but it is not installable
>   vlc: Depends: libdvbpsi2 which is a virtual package.
>        Depends: libflac4 which is a virtual package.
>        Depends: xlibs (> 4.1.0) but it is not installable
> ---
> 
> When I try to install xlibs, it says:
> ---
> No candidate version found for xlibs
> ---
> 
> I uninstalled the old version of vlc as part of my attempt to get 
> the new one to install, and I can't even get the old (sarge) 
> version to reinstall.

There is no version of vlc in testing, and judging by the excuses page
[1] there may not be for quite some time, due to its many dependencies
and (even worse) an old licensing bug (#324978) [2].  Probably when you
attempted to upgrade vlc, APT was just trying to re-install the old
packages from Sarge.  What does "apt-cache policy vlc" show you?

xlibs is an old obsolete meta-package no longer existing in Etch or Sid,
and there are packages in Etch/Sid that specifically Conflict against
its dependency xlibs-data in order to force it off the system.

[1] http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?excuse=vlc
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/324978

Your options are basically

(a) upgrade to Sid,
(b) attempt to download and individually install the wxvlc and vlc
    debs from Sid on your Etch machine (this may not work due to
    newer library dependencies in the Sid packages), or
(c) try to build the vlc source package from Sid on your Etch machine,
    and (if successful) install the resulting binary debs.

Probably (b), if it works, or (c) if not, is the best idea since you
already have everything else working well.

regards,

-- 
Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@princeton.edu>   Physics Department
WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/    Princeton University
GPG: public key ID 4F83C751                 Princeton, NJ 08544