Re: gnome won't uninstall because I messed up dpkg by mixing and matching apt-get and aptitude incorrectly (used to be Re: upgrading in sid)

[Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net>]

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On 12/31/07 15:48, charlie derr wrote:
> 
[snip]
> 
>> Of course, I would do all this from the (real) console, not a GNOME
>> terminal window.
> 
> you're just chicken :-]

Real Men use the console.  I'm not sure what Real Women use.

> (i'm still in the same original openbox session I started in a couple
> days ago (my one concession was to not do this from my usual busy
> (50-100 application windows spread across 4 desktops) KDE session))
> 
> i did take the extra step of doing my upgrade from within a screen
> session (inside konsole, not gnome-terminal)
> 
>>
>> Lastly, I'd *never* use aptitude.
> 
> It appears (to me at least) that that's an irrational bias you have
> there.

Irrational?  I was last irrational in... in... well, it's been a
*long* time since I've been irrational.

aptitude (and wajig) likes to be more than slightly aggressive in
what else it wants to remove when you remove a "top level" (not
meta-) package.

Recent versions of apt-get strike a nice balance by listing the
packages that become orphanable by a "remove", and helpfully
suggests running "apt-get autoremove".  And just "install" the ones
you want to keep, so that apt-get stops pestering/reminding you to
autoremove them.

>        I'm going with the debian/GNU party line which says aptitude is
> superior to apt-get in some way (though I still don't think there's a
> drop-in replacement for "apt-get source" functionality to make aptitude
> do the right thing, so I would still use apt-get there, but now that i
> know "aptitude install -f" is the equivalent of "apt-get -f install", I
> really use apt-get for nothing except downloading source packages,
> aptitude happily works just fine (until this event, and I think it was
> really the number of upgradeable packages I was trying to do at once,
> and the unfortunate circumstance of not reading the apt-listbugs output
> closely enough to catch that this libxml2 problem was gonna bite me)) --
> i'm confident it'll get solved though (and if not, a reinstall isn't a
> huge burden for me).

- --
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA  USA

"Your mistletoe is no match for my TOW missile."  Santa-bot
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