Well, I finally fixed, or rather worked around, the problem I've been having with apt-get upgrade and dist-upgrade failing with all sorts of obscure, bizarre errors for over two weeks now.
Maybe my setup was broken, or maybe something in the latest APT, etc. is broken... can someone with a deeper understanding of APT tell me which? I'll be happy to file a bug if it's not my own fault. Since the new apt 0.5.x came out, I've had my system set up to allow me to update stable, testing, _and_ unstable, and pick what I wanted with the -t option or :unstable suffix. I stick with "testing" almost exclusively and _very_ rarely make use of this (but it's great when I really need it), and I don't think I have much if any unstable stuff on my system. Here is how I did it; first, I put everything in /etc/apt/sources.list: deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable/non-US main contrib non-free deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ testing main non-free contrib deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US testing/non-US main contrib non-free deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main non-free contrib deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US unstable/non-US main contrib non-free Then, I added this to /etc/apt/apt.conf to say that I wanted to keep "testing" by default: APT { // Options for apt-get Default-Release "testing"; } Finally, I added this to /etc/apt/preferences to keep it from normally considering unstable packages: Package: * Pin: release unstable Pin-Priority: -1 Up until the last 2/3 weeks that's worked flawlessly. I've been very happy. But then apt-get started reporting all kinds of weird errors with dependencies, and they would change every time I ran apt-get update. Also, many of the files it complained about aren't even installable when I try to use "apt-get install" on them directly; it says the latest version is already installed! On a whim I just commented out the unstable lines in sources.list and re-ran "apt-get upgrade" (no update first), and it worked! It offered to install all kinds of new packages without giving any errors or anything. I know this type of thing is supposed to be supported. So, obviously either I've set it up wrong and it just happened to work before, or a bug has been introduced or uncovered in apt/dpkg. Anyone have any thoughts on this subject? Should I repost to debian-devel? Some facts: here is what I get when I have the unstable stuff in sources.list: # apt-get -s upgrade Reading Package Lists... Done Building Dependency Tree... Done The following packages have been kept back cygnus-stylesheets expect5.24 gsfonts gsfonts-x11 libxml-generator-perl 274 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 5 not upgraded. Sorry, but the following packages have unmet dependencies: aspell: Depends: libstdc++2.10 but 1:2.95.2-14 is to be installed docbook-stylesheets: Depends: sgml-data but 1.5.2 is to be installed Depends: perl but 5.6.1-5 is to be installed gtksu: Depends: libgtk1.2 (>= 1.2.0) but 1.2.10-1 is to be installed python-rng: Depends: python-numeric but 17.1.2-5 is to be installed task-c++-dev: Depends: task-devel-common but 0.7 is to be installed task-c-dev: Depends: task-devel-common but 0.7 is to be installed ymessenger: Depends: libgtk1.2 (>= 1.2.0) but 1.2.10-1 is to be installed E: Internal Error, InstallPackages was called with broken packages! # apt-get -s install aspell gtksu python-rng ymessenger docbook-stylesheets Reading Package Lists... Done Building Dependency Tree... Done Sorry, aspell is already the newest version. Sorry, gtksu is already the newest version. Sorry, python-rng is already the newest version. Sorry, ymessenger is already the newest version. Sorry, docbook-stylesheets is already the newest version. 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 279 not upgraded. Now, I remove the unstable lines from sources.list and it agrees to update all my packages with no worries at all: # apt-get -s upgrade Reading Package Lists... Building Dependency Tree... The following packages have been kept back cygnus-stylesheets expect5.24 gsfonts gsfonts-x11 libxml-generator-perl 274 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 5 not upgraded. Inst libc6-dev (2.2.4-1 Debian:testing) [] Inst locales (2.2.4-1 Debian:testing) [] Inst libc6 (2.2.4-1 Debian:testing) Conf libc6 (2.2.4-1 Debian:testing) Inst mawk (1.3.3-8 Debian:testing) Inst base-files (2.2.11 Debian:testing) Conf base-files (2.2.11 Debian:testing) ... Conf telnet-ssl (0.17.13+0.1-2 Debian:testing) Conf telnetd-ssl (0.17.13+0.1-2 Debian:testing) Conf tk8.0 (8.0.5-9 Debian:testing) Conf xmh (4.1.0-5 Debian:testing) Something's weird here... -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul D. Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> HASMAT--HA Software Mthds & Tools "Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional." --Mad Scientist ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- These are my opinions---Nortel Networks takes no responsibility for them.
