Re: upgrading in sid

[charlie derr <cderr@simons-rock.edu>]

> > The above is in response to   apt-get -f install (what used to work in
> > the past for fixing issues, maybe that's my mistake?)
>
> It is better to use "aptitude install -f" if aptitude is your package
> manager of choice.
>
> Anyway, it seems that you have a problem running update-gconf-defaults,
> which is called in many installation scripts, the ones of desktop-base
> among them. This might be caused by an issue with the libxml2 package or
> it could be the symptom of a more general problem with python on your
> system.

Thanks much for that explanation.


> Let's see, which output do you get from these two commands:
>
> dpkg -l libxml2 gconf2 | awk '/^[^D|+]/{print $1,$2,$3}'

delete:~# dpkg -l libxml2 gconf2 | awk '/^[^D|+]/{print $1,$2,$3}'
ii gconf2 2.20.1-2
ii libxml2 2.6.30.dfsg-3



> /usr/bin/python -V

delete:~# /usr/bin/python -V
Python 2.4.4


> > If I try to upgrade one of those packages individually with   aptitude
> > install shared-mime-info then the below happens:
> >
> > The following packages will be upgraded:
> >   gnome-session libgnome2-common libgnomevfs2-common shared-mime-info
> > 4 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 795 not upgraded.
> > Need to get 0B/2706kB of archives. After unpacking 1461kB will be used.
> > Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] y
> > Writing extended state information... Error!
> > E: I wasn't able to locate file for the desktop-base package. This might mean you need to manually fix this package.
> > E: Couldn't lock list directory..are you root?
>
> You used apt-get to break the desktop-base package behind aptitude's
> back and that seems to have confused aptitude. I would hope that this
> problem goes away once you have fixed the desktop-base package.

Thanks again for letting me know that it was my mixing apt-get and aptitude that probably screwed me up.

I'll look into fixing the desktop-base package.

	~c