On 06/19/2008 02:22 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
Hi, debian!
My system: Debian Sarge, with little alteration other than a kernel
upgrade (to 2.6.8).
I currently have aptitude 0.2.15.9 compiled at Apr 7 2005 13:32:48. I
am having severe problems with it, and have become totally confused.
I start aptitude. This status message appears at the top right of the
screen:
#Broken: 12 Will free 16.7MB of disk space DL Size: 6215kB
[...]
Would somebody please explain what's happened to my system, and how to
fix it. I would like to be able to _just_ install software, in
particular a >= 2.4 version of python.
Is there perhaps some command (apt-foo, perhaps??) which could rebuild
the package database on my system?
Is there perhaps a less flexible, easier to use package manager?
aptitude is about as complicated as mutt, but because I only use
aptitude at most a few times a year, I'm never going to get to grips
properly with it.
Thanks in advance for the help!
To know what is going on with your system, we would need to see your /etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/preferences files.
The output of this command would also help: aptitude -sV upgradeI suspect that your attempt to upgrade python broke your system. If you are not an expert with Debian, it is best to stick with a single distribution (e.g. "stable") rather than to mix distributions (e.g. "oldstable"+"stable").
One way to solve this problem would be to modify your /etc/apt/sources.list to contain only Sarge ("oldstable") sources and update aptitude. Then, using aptitude's interactive interface, remove those "obsolete and locally created packages" that seem to depend upon non-Sarge resources. Anything from "obsolete and locally created packages" that seems to be breaking the system should be removed. After that, confirm that aptitude is happy by doing another "aptitude -sV upgrade." Aptitude should not want to upgrade anything.
You need python (>= 2.4), and that version exists in Etch--which is why you wanted to mix distributions, but mixing distributions is a great way to break a Debian system, so you need backports. See if backports.org has a suitable version of python for you. If not, consider upgrading to Etch. As a Sarge user, you are not getting security updates, so you should probably want to upgrade soon anyway.
BTW, by mixing distributions, you would have problems regardless of which package manager you used.