On Fri, Dec 29, 2006 at 01:04:24AM +0000, Digby Tarvin wrote: > > > > > 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.. was this before or after a successful upgrade? > > 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 > you're losing all of X here. that's not good. are you running xorg or xfree86 still? there was a transition, to xorg, did you miss it? maybe the transition packages have already been pulled? you may have to go in and mark xorg for installation. > 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? well, its probably got bugs that prevent it from being included in etch. With etch frozen, I imagine you're sol for using it when etch goes stable, so you'll either have to backport it from sid or install from source. Either way, you'll probably have to let that one go. > > 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. I believe totem depends on gnome which you are losing altogether above. > > And xv I havn't found at all in the packages database :-/ I can only vaguely recall xv. what is it? A
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