Re: sarge->etch upgrade hits dependency hell
On Sun, Dec 10, 2006 at 09:04:13 -0500, hendrik@topoi.xxxx.com wrote:
[...]
> I wouldn't say "too smart". I'd say not smart enough. It's smart
> enough to come up with a set of consistent package versions, but not
> smart enough to come up with a reasonable set. I did find, for example,
> that a lot of the packages that were to be deleted because they depended
> on other packages were actually quite savagable -- I just '+'ed then and
> they suddenly had no such dependency difficulties -- suggesting to me
> that aptitude should have been able to discover that itself.
[...]
> The logjam broke when I deleted the xfractint package -- this was
> undicated by the presence of an xfractint file within /use/X11R6/bin.
That is probably the explanation for a lot of your upgrade troubles: A
few non-Debian packages can easily upset the delicate balance of package
dependencies that is so carefully maintained by the Debian developers.
I think this is especially dangerous during a dist-upgrade. xfractint is
not in Sarge, therefore it is not so surprising that the dist-upgrade
process could not deal well with its presence. Just to give another
example: A very common show-stopper reported on this list during the
upgrade to xorg 7.0 was the presence of opera and its files in
/usr/X11R6/bin.
I think it is advisable to remove all non-Debian packages before a Sarge
-> Etch upgrade and reinstall them again afterwards, using official Etch
packages whenever possible.
You can run
aptitude search '~i!~Odebian'
to find installed ("~i") packages that have an origin ("~O") other than
("!") 'debian'. (This will also list all packages which are no longer
part of Debian, which might be a good opportunity to get rid of some
cruft on your system.)
I hope that the version of aptitude in Sarge already supports this type
of search pattern, but I do not know for sure.
--
Regards,
Florian
Reply to: