On Sat, Nov 04, 2006 at 05:51:05 -0600, Russell L. Harris wrote:
I am running a fresh install (two weeks ago) of Etch, and I have been
using synaptic to install and update packages.
As a result of discussions on this thread, I just ran aptitude.
Aptitude tells me that there is a broken package, and suggested that,
because of dependency problems, I remove exim4, exim4-base,
exim4-daemon-light, ftp, netbase, nfs-common, ntp, ntp-simple, ntp-date,
openbsd-inetd, pidentd, telnet and I install nbstmp.
What is going on here? It appears to me that it is aptitude which needs
to be uninstalled. I suspect that the operation proposed by aptitude
would render my installation unusable and likely irreparable. My
inclination is to trust synaptic.
Did you try to do a "dist-upgrade" equivalent with synaptic lately? You
might run into the same issues then. (You do not give any details about
the aptitude commands that you tried.)
For example, the newest versions of several MTA packages conflict with
each other which could explain the exim4 - nbsmtp issue. Something
similar might be behind the rest of the things that aptitude wants to
do. Aptitude will explain the reasons for its intended actions if you
run it with the "-D" option.