I have been following your thread & you have my sympathy. I'm too ignorant to have any ideas or suggestions. Your problems sound like mine except on a bigger scale. The Debian people keep claiming that dpkg & dselect are so great but in my experience they are at best medium in practice. They admit that the interface is not the best but that the basic workingness is very good. And they do seem to be a good place to start from to write something that does work well. And the documentation! Enough said.

At 3/4/99 08:42 PM , you wrote:
Stephen Pitts wrote:

>
You don't. Downgrading packages has undefined results. A better option would be to tell the list about your problems and we'll help you fix them
--

Currently dselect marks 90% of the package on my system as broken. And there are a lot of them. I tried switching to exim from smail, just to try it. I have constant error messages. Several aps/ games like quake no longer run when not in X and I can not seem to find the requested libraries or get them installed. Fetchmail does not work Most things on the box seem to work fine, but the whole thing seems a little whacked

In the hope that my errors will not be repeated by other I will endure the embarrassment of explaining how this happened. My system was running fine off the packages is on my Debian 2.0 cdrom. I decided to upgrade some of the packages via ftp. When I upgraded the package lists of stable, unstable, contrib, and non-free dselect presumed that I wanted to upgrade everything on my system. That everything I had previously installed that had a newer package available was selected for install
and included in the download list.

This created a serious problem for me because I need the packaging system to warn me about dependencies. If I cancel the download and try to install individual packages via dpkg the required packages will already be marked as selected and no dependency warnings will be given.

I tried getting part of the list of aps I wanted to upgrade, but got a ton of error messages for the reasons just cited. Not knowing what else to do I decided to get everything that had been selected. I must say I'm kind of ashamed of this since I really do know better than to hog an ftp site like that, but I really did not know what else to do.

Needless to say lots of errors occur when you try to ftp hundreds of mgs of files. Now dselect say 90% of my packages are broken. Far to many to fix one at a time using dpkg. I feel as if I have lost control of my system. I would like to get control back. Any help is greatly
appreciated.  Thank You

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