Re: Difficulty with dpkg dependencies
On Thu, 2007-07-12 at 16:08 -0600, Bob Proulx wrote:
> Dallas Clement wrote:
> > The output of dpkg -l on my target system is:
> > ii libc6-i386 2.3.6
> > Hence, I can see that the package 'libc6-i386' is indeed installed.
>
> It does look like it.
>
> > The subsequent attempt to install busybox, e2fsprogs or any other
> > package that depends on libc6-i386 fails however.
> >
> > dpkg: package e2fsprogs depends on libc6-i386, which is not installed or
> flagged to be installed
>
> That is very strange and I don't see an obvious problem or solution.
>
> It is strange that the official Debian package for busybox depends on
> libc6 while your custom version depends upon libc6-386. That is a
> difference that should be tracked down. Your custom version should
> build exactly the same way that the Debian version builds. Especially
> since raju reported that it worked fine for him and I am sure it would
> for me as well.
>
> You may have something strange going on with your particular system.
> You might want to try building in a clean chroot so as to isolate
> problems. The 'pbuilder' package can help you here.
>
> apt-cache show pbuilder
>
> > Btw, the target system on which I am installing these packages is a
> > custom built Linux kernel 2.6.21.1.
>
> Thanks for mentioning it but the choice of kernel will not affect the
> problem that you are currently seeing.
>
> > I'm using the busybox 'dpkg' command to install the packages on this
> > system.
>
> I did not realize that busybox provided a dpkg replacement. Hopefully
> it uses dpkg-dev and so the behavior will be the same regardless of
> the front-end differences.
>
> > I'm not having any problems building the packages for busybox,
> > e2fsprogs, or whatever. Just having problems installing them due to
> > these dependency issues with libc6-i386 which should already be
> > installed as seen above.
>
> Could you say a few words about why the pre-packaged version of
> busybox is not sufficient? It would be motivating in the process of
> trying to help why your custom version does not install.
>
> Bob
>
Hello Bob, Thank you for the reply.
I'm using a cross-compiler to build busybox, e2fsprogs, and some other
applications for an embedded network appliance that does not have much
disk space. Hence, wanting to configure and build myself so as to be
able to take out things that are not needed.
I think it is probably the cross-compiler that is adding the -i386 onto
libc6. Regardless, I was under the impression that dpkg would do its
package dependency check by looking for the package name that is
depended on in the file /var/lib/dpkg/status. As you can see from the
output I provided, the busybox package depends line clearly matches with
what is in this file. Perhaps it is more complicated than this?
Busybox definitely provides a 'dpkg' command. I would be surprised if
what I am experiencing is a bug in the implementation. What I am doing
seems so basic! I'm now looking at the code for the busybox dpkg
implementation and putting in some debug msgs to see why it is behaving
this way.
Cheers,
Dallas
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