Re: PCMCIA problems upgrading slink -> potato

[Julian Gilbey <J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk>]

On Thu, Feb 03, 2000 at 06:55:48AM -0500, Brandon Mitchell wrote:
> There is this constant trade off between too many and too few questions. 
> I think that because apt told you what it was about to remove, and the
> fact that most of the laptop world has an idea of what pcmcia is, we have
> asked enough questions here.  We can't make the package essential because
> it isn't for people that don't have laptops.  We aren't going to kluge apt
> to ask for this one package.  A question in the pre-remove script (I'm
> guessing this would be another way) would add another question to people
> who remove the pcmcia stuff on an initial install right after they were
> just asked the same question by the bootfloppies.
> 
> My personal opinion is that cdroms are the best for laptops, and people
> should expect problems when upgrading to anything except stable.
> 
> I hope your laptop is doing better now,
> Brandon

Oh, my laptop's fine, thanks.  I'm just wondering if there's some way
of improving the situation without too much difficulty.  Something
like having kernel module packages marked as such, and requiring apt
to have a flag set or something before it will automatically remove a
kernel module package which relates to the currently running kernel.
I think there might be more reason for this than just laptop users,
although I have never personally experienced it.  (And if two people
have fallen foul of this problem, I'm sure there are more.)

Another little thing: I know that I can set the status of a package to
"hold" using dselect; is there any way of doing it from the apt-get
command line?  It would have made sense in this case to be able to
say: apt-get --hold pcmcia-modules-2.0.36 dist-upgrade  to force the
package not to be removed.

   Julian

-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

  Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk
        Debian GNU/Linux Developer,  see http://www.debian.org/~jdg
  Donate free food to the world's hungry: see http://www.thehungersite.com/