> > > > One of the things that bothered me about what aptitude wanted to do > > > > was that it included several packages it threatened to remove because > > > > they were 'no longer used'. I don't know how it decided this, as the > > > > list included packages like 'xv' and 'xearth' which I explicitly > > > > installed and definately use quite regularly.... > > > > > > run aptitude in interactive mode and manually mark those packages: > > > > > > aptitude > > > > > > then 'u' to update, 'U' to mark for upgrade, then 'g' to see what it > > > want to do. scroll through and mark 'm' on those you want to keep, > > > which should mark them as manually installed. you may need to '+' > > > them as well, to keep them around. I have not been using aptitude long > > > (having used apt-get exclusively before), but am learning that you can > > > actually get it to do what *you* want with a little fiddling. Then it > > > will generally respect what you want... > > > > So this behaviour could be the result of my having installed some > > applications using 'apt-get install' rather than aptitude, leaving > > aptitude unaware of them being manual rather than automatic > > installs? That would explain things. > > absolutely correct. > > keep on pluggin' away
It seems I am not out of the woods yet. I just tried executing apt-get install libx11-dev which is the package I needed to install in the first place when I got distracted onto upgrading my system.. Amoungst the actions it threatened to do was: The following packages will be REMOVED gnome gnome-core gnome-desktop-environment gnome-doc-utils gnome-office lbxproxy libapache2-mod-php4 libapache2-mod-python proxymngr python-libxml2 python-newt python2.3-imaging-tk python2.3-tk skencil sketch totem x-window-system xdm xearth xfs xfwp xlibs xlibs-data xlockmore-gl xprint xserver-common xv xvfb yelp I was again disturbed by the threatened removal of some applications I know I regularly use (such as xearth, xv and totem), so I did some digging starting with 'xearth', and it seems that package has been removed from testing (but not stable or unstable) and the version I had installed (1.1-10.1) requires xbase < 3.3.2.3a-2 which presumably conflicts with other packages which are required for for the libx11-dev package.. The page which I found indicating the removal of xearth from testing is http://packages.qa.debian.org/x/xearth.html but it doesn't give any explanation of why, and I am not sure where to look next. Should I be fetching the unstable version? Or would it be better to just install from source and forget the debian packages for this application? Not sure about the other packages - totem for example appears to have a newer version available, so I don't understand why the threat to delete it. And xv I havn't found at all in the packages database :-/ Regards, DigbyT -- Digby R. S. Tarvin digbyt(at)digbyt.com http://www.digbyt.com -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]