Last night I upgraded my fairly stock slink machine to potato using
"apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade". I have various questions.
The last group of questions is about all the errors that occurred.
o Does potato contain all of the Y2K upgrades in slink and a half?
And all current security updates?
o I'm curious why 15 packages were kept back. How do I find out what
caused this? (The packages are: libmime-base64-perl fvwm eperl
libtime-hires-perl libpgperl eterm libcurses-pe rl
libterm-readkey-perl perlmagick mixviews kbd liblockdev0-perl pdl
libcompress- zlib-perl perl-tk.) Are they just old? Should I
remove them?
o I also downloaded, configured, compiled and installed kernel 2.2.13.
I found that I now have trouble accessing my pcmcia modem card.
Sometimes changing the irq with setserial fixes it, but sometimes it
doesn't. I've now turned off various other ports in the BIOS to
free up more irq's, but I still get irregular behaviour. Did
something change that could cause this?
o A lot of errors occurred during the upgrade, and I had to intervene
manually several times. Do these things represent bugs in apt,
dpkg, or some package control files? Here are a few examples:
- Throughout the upgrade I got the following messages:
ldconfig: warning: can't open /usr/lib/libslang.so (No such file
or directory), skipping
ldconfig: warning: /usr/lib/libtcpwrapGK.so.1 is not a symlink
ldconfig: warning: /usr/lib/libomnithread.so.2 is not a symlink
ldconfig: warning: /usr/lib/libomniORB2.so.6 is not a symlink
ldconfig: warning: /usr/lib/libomniLC.so.2 is not a symlink
What do they mean?
- Throughout the upgrade I got the following message:
Cannot find termcap: Can't find a valid termcap file at
/usr/lib/perl5/5.004/Term/ReadLine.pm line 305
What does it mean?
- I also got this a lot:
dhelp_parse: You can add only directories under /usr/doc!
warning: error occured during execution of /usr/sbin/dhelp_parse
-a at /usr/sbin/install-docs line 241.
(For example, it occurred right after the line
"Installing new version of config file /etc/imlib/imrc ...".)
- The most annoying part was the following error, which stopped the
install:
install/dpkg-dev: Byte-compiling for emacs20
/usr/lib/emacsen-common/packages/install/emacsen-common-install:
cd: /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/dpkg-dev: No such file or directory
emacs-install: /usr/lib/emacsen-common/packages/install/
emacsen-common-install emacs20 failed at
/usr/lib/emacsen-common/emacs-install line 28.
dpkg: error processing emacs20 (--configure):
subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 29
In the end, the only way I could find to get around this was to
uninstall dpkg-dev and the things that depend on it, configure
emacs, and then reinstall those packages. What went wrong above?
- When emacs 20.3 was replaced with 20.4, some stuff got left behind
in /usr/share/emacs/20.3/etc/bbdb/*, .../20.3/site-lisp/debview,
.../20.3/site-lisp/psgml and .../20.3/site-lisp/python-elisp.
I just manually erased it all, but shouldn't it have been removed
automatically?
- Some of the startup files in /etc/{emacs,emacs20}/site-start.d/
have not been byte-compiled. Is this correct behavior? Also,
some of the byte-compiled files are older than their sources.
Are these old byte-compiled files, or were they simply installed
with old dates?
- Is there a reason that the psgml package contains the empty
directory /etc/emacs19/site-start.d? ("dpkg -S emacs19" produces
psgml: /etc/emacs19
psgml: /etc/emacs19/site-start.d )
I don't have emacs19 installed.
- When the upgrade got to mgetty it produced:
Preparing to replace mgetty 1.1.18-1 (using
.../archives/mgetty_1.1.21-2.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement mgetty ...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/mgetty_1.1.21-2.deb
(--unpack):
trying to overwrite `/etc/mgetty/new_fax', which is also in package
mgetty-fax
Preparing to replace mgetty-fax 1.1.18-1 (using
.../mgetty-fax_1.1.21-2.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement mgetty-fax ...
and then the install stopped shortly thereafter. I typed "apt-get
dist-upgrade" and the installed continued without a problem.
- When the upgrade got to r-base it produced:
Preparing to replace r-base 0.62.4-2 (using
.../archives/r-base_0.90.0-0.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement r-base ...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/r-base_0.90.0-0.deb
(--unpack):
trying to overwrite `/usr/lib/R/library/splines/R/splines', which is
also in package r-cran
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)
The only way this would go away is if I remove r-cran and r-base.
If these errors aren't due to mistakes on my part, then hopefully they
can be fixed for others who try to upgrade. I will eventually submit
bug reports but thought I'd start here first. Thanks for any
information.
Dan
--
Dan Christensen
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
