On Thu, Mar 22, 2007 at 22:03:38 -0400, Frank McCormick wrote: [...]
> Bottom line, keep KDE off your machine :). I like the smiley there... > Seriously, I still don't > understand why removing kde-desktop pulled off avahi-daemon. I went > back into the Aptitude log, and confirmed it was one of the packages it > removed. Aptitude did what you told it to do. Let me explain: The avahi-daemon package was installed on your system as an indirect dependency of the kdenetwork package, which in turn was installed because the kde metapackage depends on it. Aptitude keeps track of such automatic installations of dependencies and in its default configuration it will remove any automatically installed package which is no longer needed. (This helps to keep cruft off the system.) So once you remove "kde", no other package depends on kdenetwork anymore and it will be removed as well. This eventually leads to the removal of avahi-daemon. (The intermediate dominoes are the packages kdnssd and libnss-mdns, I think). Aptitude is a very powerful tool, but it can probably drive you crazy if you do not understand its design philosophy. The aptitude-doc package is available in several languages, and there is also an article on NewbieDOC which tries to explain the most common pitfalls: http://newbiedoc.berlios.de/wiki/Aptitude_-_using_together_with_Synaptic_and_Apt-get (Things can get even more confusing if you mix aptitude with other package managers.) The fact that your working network connection was broken by installing and then removing avahi-daemon, on the other hand, sounds like a real bug. (But it is probably not a bug of aptitude.) -- Regards, Florian -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
