Re: How to trick my Debian in thinking that a package is not installed
On Tue, Apr 27 at 10:32, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. penned:
> On Tuesday 27 April 2010 08:48:48 Daniel Burrows wrote:
>
> > Essentially, it causes held packages to be added to the root set
> > (and that's the best implementation, I think: modify aptitude's
> > custom root set function to include held packages).
>
> You lost me, but I haven't delved into the aptitude source code. My
> approach would have been just making the 'hold' action also clear
> the 'automatically installed' flag; essentially "institutionalizing"
> the temporary solution. But, I defer to your solution as it sounds
> more flexible.
I'm also not familiar with the implementation, but I would prefer that
automatically installed packages stay automatically installed, so that
they have the possibility of being automatically removed when no longer
needed.
I use "hold" liberally to weather Sid storms. There are two cases I
see crop up: one, aptitude suggests removing packages without an
obvious replacement. Two, aptitude marks things as broken that have
been working just fine. In either case, I start slamming the "=" key
until packages will no longer be removed, and nothing is marked
broken. This works 99.99% of the time. At some later period when I
suspect the storm has passed, I test the waters by unholding the
packages and gauging aptitude's reaction.
I also use "hold" when apt-listbugs + some investigation leads me to
believe I'm better off with the current version. (There's some reason
I don't use forbid-version, but I don't recall. Maybe it wasn't
persisting between sessions? But that would have been years ago.)
All of which is to say, just because I've marked a package on hold
doesn't mean that I want it on my system forever. But if that's the
only way to deal with the problem, then I can certainly manage. My
system is ancient, and there are already plenty of package on it whose
presence I can't easily explained. What's the harm in a few more?
If this is a misuse of "hold" and there's a better way, though, I'm
all ears. Rereading, it seems like "forbid-version" would be the
right call for most of what I'm doing, assuming it does persist
between aptitude sessions.
--
monique
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