Re: update messages
> > > > 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.
>
> absolutely correct.
>
> keep on pluggin' away
It seems I am not out of the woods yet. I just tried executing
apt-get install libx11-dev
which is the package I needed to install in the first place when I
got distracted onto upgrading my system..
Amoungst the actions it threatened to do was:
The following packages will be REMOVED
gnome gnome-core gnome-desktop-environment gnome-doc-utils gnome-office
lbxproxy libapache2-mod-php4 libapache2-mod-python proxymngr python-libxml2
python-newt python2.3-imaging-tk python2.3-tk skencil sketch totem
x-window-system xdm xearth xfs xfwp xlibs xlibs-data xlockmore-gl xprint
xserver-common xv xvfb yelp
I was again disturbed by the threatened removal of some applications I
know I regularly use (such as xearth, xv and totem), so I did some
digging starting with 'xearth', and it seems that package has been
removed from testing (but not stable or unstable) and the version I
had installed (1.1-10.1) requires xbase < 3.3.2.3a-2 which presumably
conflicts with other packages which are required for for the libx11-dev
package..
The page which I found indicating the removal of xearth from testing is
http://packages.qa.debian.org/x/xearth.html
but it doesn't give any explanation of why, and I am not sure where to
look next.
Should I be fetching the unstable version? Or would it be better to
just install from source and forget the debian packages for this
application?
Not sure about the other packages - totem for example appears to
have a newer version available, so I don't understand why the threat
to delete it.
And xv I havn't found at all in the packages database :-/
Regards,
DigbyT
--
Digby R. S. Tarvin digbyt(at)digbyt.com
http://www.digbyt.com
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