On Sun, May 01, 2005 at 11:39:03AM -0600, Monique Y. Mudama wrote: > On 2005-05-01, Paul E Condon penned: > > > > In most cases this is good, but it can lead to aptitude doing really > > bad things in some special situations. For instance, I once > > installed kde by requesting the single over-all package that exists > > only to bring in all the packages needed to give the user a standard > > kde set-up. Then, after using it for a while, I decided that a lot > > of what was there was stuff and clutter that I didn't want. I tried > > to remove the stuff that I didn't want, but aptitude wouldn't do it, > > because it insisted that I had to remove the over-all kde package > > first. But when I removed that, it threatened to remove _all_ kde > > packages, which is not what I wanted. I used apt-get to remove the > > package kde. This made all of kde's component packages into > > independent packages in the little mind of aptitude. Then I removed > > the ones that I didn't want without aptitude trashing the rest of my > > kde set-up. > > Ah, yes. I've run into that kind of obnoxiousness before. > > I think the "right" thing to do here would be to mark all the > kde-related packages as being "manually" installed, or at least some > key subset. AIUI, that will promote them to first-class citizens of > aptitude-land. But when I ran into the problem, I don't think I knew > about that.
When I ran into that, during a routine sarge upgrade (seems the kde package was temporarily absent or something) I went over the list of things it wanted to delete. For each one I asked what deoended on it, and followed the chains up until I found something or nothing I wanted. Then I explicitly asked to install that, or not. After a while, the list was reasonably short and I was happy with it. What bothers me are the times I get a huge list of packages to be deleted because no one wants them, and simultaneously a huge list of packages to be newly installed. The trouble is that the lists are vary similar. A lot of these packages should have been listed as upgrades, not deletions and installs. -- hendrik -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]