On Thu, Jun 28, 2007 at 06:49:35PM -0700, Marc Shapiro wrote: > I have an Etch system that I keep up to date with nightly downloads > using cron-apt and doing a manual 'aptitude upgrade' every few days. A > few days ago I noticed that OOo was being held back. A little research > showed that it needed the installation of libneon25. But I already have > libneon26 installed. As far as apt(itude) is concerned, libneon25 and libneon26 are *different* packages. The "25" and "26" here are part of the package name, not version number. Package maintainers sometimes let the major version numbers be part of the package name for libraries to let multiple versions be installed simultaneously. It speeds up the upgrade process; imagine this scenario: - In january, packages A and B depend on libneon25 - In feb, a new version of libneon (26) is released. But this has ABI changes, so software needs to be recompiled/changed to use it - Package A is recompiled for the libneon26 abi. It now depends on libneon26 rather than libneon25 If it was not possible to have both libneon25 and libneon26 installed simultaneously, then you couldn't have package A and B installed at the same time either. > Aptitude shows it as being automatically installed, so it is aware of >the package, but says that it is unused and will be removed. Why dos >aptitude want to remove libneon26 and install libneon25? Aptitude is clever. If nothing depends on libneon26, and it's not one of the packages that you specifically wanted installed, then it's a candidate for removal. Sounds like you had something installed (at some point) that needed libneon26, but that "something" has been removed again. So aptitude tries to tidy up for you. > Is there any way to use what I have, or do I need to let aptitude > downgrade libneon? Unless you need libneon26 for something else outside the package management system (e.g. stuff you manually installed in /usr/local or /opt), I'd say to let aptitude do its thing. It's very good at keeping things tidy. Hope this helps -- Karl E. Jorgensen karl@jorgensen.org.uk http://www.jorgensen.org.uk/ karl@jorgensen.com http://karl.jorgensen.com ==== Today's fortune: It's not really a rule--it's more like a trend. -- Larry Wall in <199710221721.KAA24321@wall.org>
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