Re: update messages
On Thu, Dec 28, 2006 at 01:02:25PM -0800, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
>
> as you know, running apt-get and aptitude can cause a database to get
> out of sync...
Actually I have only recently become aware of this. I had previously
just thought of aptitude as a menu based front end for apt, so I
tended to use 'apt-get install' when I knew exactly what I wanted,
and 'aptitude' when I needed to browse or couldn't remember the
command to do something :-/
> but your plan is not without merit. If you have
> previously used aptitude exclusively, you can do the same thing as
> above but s/apt-get/aptitude/g.
>
> aptitude update && aptitude upgrade
>
> will give you the same behavior as apt-get...
Ah, thanks. That is worth knowing.
> > to get the easier updates done first, and then if that goes well
> > follow up with a hopefully smaller
> > apt-get dist-upgrade
> > to deal with the remainder in a separate run.
>
> and then follow up with
>
> aptitude dist-upgrade
Is that last line what is needed to get aptitude back into
sync? If not, how is that achieved?
> > Then I can try running aptitude and hopefully it will have stopped
> > crashing and can tell me what else it thinks is left to be done....
>
> I missed the bit about it crashing. what's happening?
It only started happening after I had tried an 'apt-get install aptitude'
to upgrade to the latest version (and co-incidentally after I had done
the 'apt-get install' of the pgp keyring - so I am not certain which
was responsible).
What happens now is that after any attempt to issue a 'u' command in
aptitude, I get an abort leaving me back in the command line (with a
garbled display) and the error message:
aptitude: symbol lookup error: aptitude: undefined symbol: _ZN9pkgPolicyD2Ev
> > One of the things that bothered me about what aptitude wanted to do
> > was that it included several packages it threatened to remove because
> > they were 'no longer used'. I don't know how it decided this, as the
> > list included packages like 'xv' and 'xearth' which I explicitly
> > installed and definately use quite regularly....
>
> run aptitude in interactive mode and manually mark those packages:
>
> aptitude
>
> then 'u' to update, 'U' to mark for upgrade, then 'g' to see what it
> want to do. scroll through and mark 'm' on those you want to keep,
> which should mark them as manually installed. you may need to '+'
> them as well, to keep them around. I have not been using aptitude long
> (having used apt-get exclusively before), but am learning that you can
> actually get it to do what *you* want with a little fiddling. Then it
> will generally respect what you want...
So this behaviour could be the result of my having installed some
applications using 'apt-get install' rather than aptitude, leaving
aptitude unaware of them being manual rather than automatic
installs? That would explain things.
Thanks for the advice.
Regards,
DigbyT
--
Digby R. S. Tarvin digbyt(at)digbyt.com
http://www.digbyt.com
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