Re: how to put packages on hold -- permanently

[Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com>]

Andrei Popescu put forth on 12/30/2009 3:41 AM:

> I prefer to ask dpkg about installed packages, it should know best ;)

I find the aptitude show results more useful.  I have no idea what the first
three lines of the dpkg -l output below are trying to tell me.


:/# dpkg -l postfix
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Cfg-files/Unpacked/Failed-cfg/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name                        Version                     Description
+++-===========================-===========================-======================================================================
ii  postfix                     2.5.5-1.1                   High-performance
mail transport agent


:/# aptitude show postfix
Package: postfix
State: installed
Automatically installed: no
Version: 2.5.5-1.1
Priority: extra
Section: mail
Maintainer: LaMont Jones <lamont@debian.org>
Uncompressed Size: 2793k
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.7-1), libdb4.6, libsasl2-2, libssl0.9.8 (>= 0.9.8f-5),
debconf (>= 0.5) | debconf-2.0, netbase, adduser (>=
         3.48), dpkg (>= 1.8.3), lsb-base (>= 3.0-6), ssl-cert
Suggests: procmail, postfix-mysql, postfix-pgsql, postfix-ldap, postfix-pcre,
sasl2-bin, libsasl2-modules, resolvconf, postfix-cdb,
          mail-reader, ufw
Conflicts: libnss-db (< 2.2-3), mail-transport-agent, postfix-tls, smail
Replaces: mail-transport-agent, postfix-tls
Provides: mail-transport-agent, postfix-tls
Description: High-performance mail transport agent
 Postfix is Wietse Venema's mail transport agent that started life as an
alternative to the widely-used Sendmail program.  Postfix
 attempts to be fast, easy to administer, and secure, while at the same time
being sendmail compatible enough to not upset existing
 users. Thus, the outside has a sendmail-ish flavor, but the inside is
completely different.