package management begins to annoy me

[Urs Thuermann <urs@isnogud.escape.de>]

I use Debian testing on 2 desktop machines and a notebook, the oldest
of them is 4-5 years old.  While in the begining I found apt-get and
dpkg quite usable (but didn't like dselect), now aptitude tends more
and more to annoy me, for several reasons.  Maybe, and I hope so, this
is only because i don't know apt-get and aptitude well enough.

1. aptitude has the nice feature of marking packages that are install
   automatically, qhich I always missed in apt-get.  But every once in
   a while I check the installed package with

        aptitude search . | grep ^i

   (BTW, is there a simpler way to do this?) and I quite often see
   installed packages, which are not marked 'A' for automatically
   installed but which I definitely know I have never installed
   manually.  Unfortunately, I currently don't have examples at hand.

2. Every 1-2 months or so I do a

        aptitude update && aptitude -R safe-upgrade

   but more and more often I see aptitude wanting to bloat my
   installation of currently roughly 2 GB by another 400 or 500 MB by
   installing hundreds of new packages.  My suspect is that
   increasingly many packages have broken dependencies and want to
   pull in quite a lot of other packages which they really shouldn't
   depend on.

   However, I don't know for sure concrete examples for this, except
   that 2+ years ago, I wanted to upgrade the already installed CD
   ripper grip by running

        aptitude install grip

   and this insisted on installing almost the complete cups system.  I
   found this completely broken since I don't had a printer at all and
   you can use grip quite well without printing.

3. On a Debian testing system at work, where I haven't upgraded for
   maybe 3-4 months I ran

        aptitude -R safe-upgrade

   which caused aptitude to run for an hour generating thousands of
   messages about resolving open/closed/defered dependency conflicts
   and then giving up.  I was only able to upgrade package for package
   explicitly for a couple dozen packages, then safe-upgrade worked
   again.

4. On my notebook I have today safe-upgraded with -R (which caused an
   increase of 140 MB to beof the installed size) and now the system
   seems to be quite up-to-date.  Nevertheless, I now have problems
   installing new packages involving perl (like I have had several
   times before).  aptitude wants to upgrade perl, perl-base, and
   perl-modules, then it detects some unmet dependencies

        The following packages have unmet dependencies:
          libglib-perl: Depends: perlapi-5.8.8 which is a virtual package.
          libcompress-zlib-perl: Depends: perlapi-5.8.8 which is a virtual package.
          libperl5.8: Depends: perl-base (= 5.8.8-12) but 5.10.0-19 is to be installed.
          ...

   which it wants to resolve by removing

        Remove the following packages:
        abiword-gnome
        cogito
        git-core
        gnome
        gnome-office
        libcompress-zlib-perl
        libdigest-sha1-perl
        libft-perl
        libperl5.8

   which I don't want to accept but all other following suggestions
   aren't better.  In the past, upgrading perl has also caused svk to
   be removed, and I wasn't able to reinstall svk although I really
   missed it.

5. Doing an

        aptitude full-upgrade

   seems to solve these problems with perl in 4. and upgrades perl to
   the current version but it also wants to install 327 new packages
   increasing disk usage by 675 MB:

        76 packages upgraded, 327 newly installed, 21 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
        Need to get 432MB of archives. After unpacking 675MB will be used.

   which find quite expensive since I only want to upgrade, not
   install a whole lot of unneeded packages.  With apt-get it looks
   the same.

So, am I doing something completely wrong here?


urs