On 2018-02-03 11:46 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: > greetings all; > > I very carefully selected docs, x11, kde and xfce to be installed on > this rock64. That was something over 2000 packages when I hit the g.
Seems a lot, but X and two desktops is a lot of stuff. Using --no-install-recommends is one way to install way less stuff. (In the GUI untick "Install recommended packages automatically " under 'Options'). I always do this for build-dependencies. Possibly not such a good idea for a desktop but it should work. Why are you installing two desktops if you don't want 'too much' stuff? I just tried using a bare, current unstable chroot. Installing x11, kde, and xfce (sudo aptitude install xserver-xorg xfce4 task-kde-desktop) is 1792 packages 3907 MB unpacked). Without recommends (sudo aptitude --without-recommends install xserver-xorg xfce4 task-kde-desktop) it's 1005 packages, 1993 MB unpacked Doing it in the curses interface gets the same results, showing me that xserver-xorg is +67MB, xfc4 +1682MB, task-kde-desktop +3810MB, so X is much lighter wieght than a desktop. xfce4 desktop is half the weight of a kde desktop. Now I did just check that on this x86 machine, but it really shouldn't be materially different on arm64. > So how _do_ you control this application? Aptitude is marvellous. I'm not sure why you are having trouble with it. It has a nice interface that make exploring dependencies very easy - you can add and remove stuff easily, and it's good at doing tricky resolving. It certainly used to be a lot better than apt in this regard, although I think they are nearly equivalent again these days. And you can choose whether to use cli or curses. > I'm at this point, ready to re-write that image to a 64GB sdcard, and > spend days using apt to pull stuff I need in one package at a time. I > know you cannot remove a package with it, because its interpretation of > dependencies will leave you with an unbootable, destroyed system. Its > done that to me several times already. Nonsense. If you want to report bugs you are going to need to be specific, about 'before' status, and 'after' status. If aptitude is really messing up arm64 systems just because you asked to remove packages then that's not good. But without enough info to reproduce nothing much can be done. > So when do we get a default, just works, does _only_ what you ask it to, > text/ncurses based package manager with a bare bones arm64 install? > Something you can actually build a working system with? I use aptitude all the time, for many years, on arm and x86. It has _very_ rarely screwed up. It's actually quite good at _unscrewing_ a machine with a messed-up mixed set of packages. Are you mixing repositories (like stable and unstable?). Be very careful if doing that. An incredibly useful tip is to change the default aptitude display to include the suite name: change (in 'preferences') 'display format' from: %c%a%M%S %p %Z %v %V to %c%a%M%S %p %Z %t %v %V (IMHO this should be the default for everyone). Wookey -- Principal hats: Linaro, Debian, Wookware, ARM http://wookware.org/
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