Re: How do you get aptitude to do what you want?

[Brian Nelson <pyro@debian.org>]

lee <lee@yun.yagibdah.de> writes:

> 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.
>
> Maybe I should go back to dselect. I always liked dselect way better ...

I understand your frustration, but dselect has always been notoriously
bad at this sort of stuff as well.

I don't know what the current state of testing is, but it's quite
possible that it's simply in an unresolvable state right now and
there's little aptitude can do about it.

-- 
Captain Logic is not steering this tugboat.