On Fri, Dec 15, 2006 at 17:08:04 +0000, Chris Lale wrote:
> Miles Bader wrote:
> >Chris Lale writes:
> >
> >>Would you mind telling me why you think this is misinformation? (I had
> >>in mind that using Apt-get for a while and then using Aptitude could
> >>result in Aptitude wanting to remove packages that you wanted to keep.)
> >>
> >
> >AFAIK, modulo bugs, that isn't the case. The problem with mixing
> >apt-get and aptitude is that aptitude might automatically remove _fewer_
> >packages than you'd like.
> >
> >-Miles
> >
>
> I think that Aptitude might sometimes want to remove _more_ packages
> than you would like. In an earlier thread, Florian Kulzer tried an
> experiment in which Aptitude wanted to remove gdm after a Gnome install
> - not what you would want to happen. He wrote
> (http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2006/12/msg00288.html):
> >I wanted to check if the above trick scales up to more complicated
> >cases, so I ran "apt-get install gnome". This installed 88 packages on
> >my system and removed abiword (due to a conflict with the automatically
> >installed abiword-gnome). Afterwards I saw that "aptitude install -f"
> >wanted to remove gdm and three packages that depended on it. Aborting
> >the operation and running "aptitude keep-all" fixed this and made the
> >system stable again.
I have thought about this a little more in the meantime and I have the
suspicion that aptitude wanted to remove gdm because I had installed and
removed it myself with aptitude in the past. It seems to me that the
sudden reappearance of gdm ("sudden" as far as aptitude was concerned)
was interpreted as a problem with my prior remove command by the logic
of aptitude. That might have been the reason why aptitude wanted to
remove gdm again. I have observed this somewhat stubborn behavior of
aptitude on a number of other occasions and I normally appreciate it
very much since it seems to provide an automatic correction mechanism if
something goes wrong at the dpkg level during an upgrade. (I use Sid and
upgrade almost every day; this is probably less relevant for the Stable
branch.)
--
Regards,
Florian
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