Re: Removing KDE messed up the network
On Thu, Mar 22, 2007 at 22:03:38 -0400, Frank McCormick wrote:
[...]
> Bottom line, keep KDE off your machine :).
I like the smiley there...
> Seriously, I still don't
> understand why removing kde-desktop pulled off avahi-daemon. I went
> back into the Aptitude log, and confirmed it was one of the packages it
> removed.
Aptitude did what you told it to do. Let me explain: The avahi-daemon
package was installed on your system as an indirect dependency of the
kdenetwork package, which in turn was installed because the kde
metapackage depends on it. Aptitude keeps track of such automatic
installations of dependencies and in its default configuration it will
remove any automatically installed package which is no longer needed.
(This helps to keep cruft off the system.) So once you remove "kde", no
other package depends on kdenetwork anymore and it will be removed as
well. This eventually leads to the removal of avahi-daemon. (The
intermediate dominoes are the packages kdnssd and libnss-mdns, I think).
Aptitude is a very powerful tool, but it can probably drive you crazy if
you do not understand its design philosophy. The aptitude-doc package is
available in several languages, and there is also an article on
NewbieDOC which tries to explain the most common pitfalls:
http://newbiedoc.berlios.de/wiki/Aptitude_-_using_together_with_Synaptic_and_Apt-get
(Things can get even more confusing if you mix aptitude with other
package managers.)
The fact that your working network connection was broken by installing
and then removing avahi-daemon, on the other hand, sounds like a real
bug. (But it is probably not a bug of aptitude.)
--
Regards,
Florian
Reply to: