Re: How do you get aptitude to do what you want?
On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 15:47, lee<lee@yun.yagibdah.de> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 04:58:21PM -0500, green wrote:
>> lee wrote at 2009-06-23 14:13 -0500:
>> > I'm trying to upgrade my testing installation, but aptitude keeps yelp
>> > in its current state, claiming that upgrading yelp would break a
>> > dependency with gman. But gman is not even installed.
>>
>> One thing that has helped me with aptitude is actually using the dependency
>> resolver correctly, so just a tip:
>>
>> Initially I was not aware of the accept and reject options given by the
>> resolver, so when something was broken, I just kept pressing '.' to run through
>> lots of options. Keys 'a' and 'r' can be used to accept/reject individual
>> package state changes, and the resolver will consider that when calculating the
>> next option.
>
> Well, I tried that once, but there didn't seem to be any option
> available that would solve the problem. And when I go back and tell
> aptitude through the "normal" package selection that it should
> remove/purge a package, I expect aptitude to do just that. Instead, it
> makes other changes and keeps insisting on them and on insisting on
> doing what it wants. That is very much unacceptable --- if aptitude
> thinks it knows better than me what I want, it should work all by
> itself without any intervention needed and do exactly what I want. If
> it can't do that, it will just have to do what I tell it to do. If it
> doesn't do that, aptitude just sucks and needs to be improved or
> replaced. It's that simple.
It is way too much of a pain to deal with testing/unstable/experimental with
aptitude in non-interactive mode. Use interactive mode and it becomes a
breeze. You can see what is happening, jump around to different packages,
immediately see depends and reverse depends (and go to them), press b
to go to the next broken package, and press g at any time to see what the
actions to be taken would be and then back up to the package list with q.
And it is very easy to change the package states, to install, hold, or select
the specific version.
And of course, sometimes there are long chains of dependencies and
only some of them will enter at a given time. Then you have no choice
but to wait on upgrading those packages until the rest enter the repo.
Usually a few days or a week, but I seem to remember times that stuff
did not enter for a month.
Cheers,
Kelly Clowers
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