Re: sarge->etch upgrade hits dependency hell
On Sun, Dec 10, 2006 at 03:56:28PM +0100, Florian Kulzer wrote:
> 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.)
If a package was pointed by old sources.list or removed from the debian
site, they will be listed too. Basically this lists packages showing up
in "Obsolete and Locally Created Packages":
linux-image-2.6...
> I hope that the version of aptitude in Sarge already supports this type
> of search pattern, but I do not know for sure.
Yes. I checked it is documented and works in sarge.
~G
~t
~DB
~RB
~S
are the new addition. (See http://wiki.debian.org/DRAptitude)
Osamu
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