Re: Source of Debian wisdom
On Mon, Aug 20, 2007 at 01:30:28AM +0200, Florian Kulzer wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 19, 2007 at 22:06:29 +0000, s. keeling wrote:
> The problem is this: If you install the "kde" (or "gnome") metapackage
> with aptitude then all the other KDE (Gnome) packages are marked as
> "automatically installed" because they were pulled in to satisfy the
> dependencies of the metapackage. (That is in fact the very purpose of
> these metapackages: To save you the trouble of installing all the parts
> of KDE/Gnome manually. With aptitude, this also gives you an easy way to
> remove all of KDE/Gnome again: Just remove the top-level metapackage and
> all the automatically installed dependencies will be uninstalled, too.)
>
> Now, as long as you keep the whole set of packages, everything is fine.
> However, as soon as you remove one component you will get a domino
> effect: Let's say you want to remove knewsticker. This means that the
> kdenetwork metapackage has to be removed, too, because it depends on
> knewsticker. Unfortunately this kills the kde metapackage (since it
> depends on kdenetwork) and the whole house of cards collapses. With the
> kde package scheduled for removal, all its automatically installed
> dependencies are "unused" (as fas as aptitude knows) and therefore
> aptitude will try to remove them all at the next opportunity. This gets
> you into the dreaded "288 packages will be removed, do you want to
> continue?" situation.
>
> The first thing to do in such a case is to run
>
> aptitude keep-all
>
> (or use "Actions -> Cancel pending actions" in interactive mode)
Or, if you've been using interactive all along, after the first 'g'o and
you get the surprising list, hit q to go back to the main screen, go to
the kde meta-package, go down the list of its dependancies and mark each
of them as manually installed, except those that you don't want (or at
least don't think you want). Now mark the kde meta-package for removal.
Now tell aptitude to 'g'o, and it should only want to remove the
meta-package and anything else that you didn't select for manual
install. Tell it to 'g'o ahead.
As for removing knewsticker, if the KDE meta-package depends on it,
aptiude should show some packages broken (see the second line of the
screen). It doesn't go about resoving the breakage untill you tell it
to 'g'o the first time. You can scroll to the first broken package with
'b' and it will tell you why that package is broken.
The point is that all this takes place within the interactive screen.
You can exit at any time and it will remember where you left off if you
need time to think/sleep.
Doug.
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