On Wed, 17 Sep 2014 15:03:27 -0700 tom arnall <kloro2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I recently did a dist-upgrade and found afterwards that a lot of > applications were missing: > > open office > smplayer > skype > calibre > poppler text utilities > > And about half a dozen more. And this was after only a few days use of > the new system, i.e., i fear there may be other missing children. > > Is this normal? You don't say which distribution this is, but it's either testing or unstable. This doesn't happen in stable, but it's fairly regular in unstable. I don't use testing, but I'd have thought this kind of thing was unusual there, as this sort of serious disturbance should be fixed in unstable. What happens is usually that part of a large sub-system, (Gnome, KDE, Qt, Python etc.) has been upgraded, but not all of it. Because an old part is incompatible with some of the new stuff, it has been removed, along with anything that is dependent on it. > > Is there anything i can do to avoid the problem next time I do an > upgrade? > > Yes. Don't use dist-upgrade straight away (Synaptic does so by default if not configured otherwise) but use upgrade (full-upgrade/safe-upgrade with aptitude). This will never remove packages, only the old versions of upgraded ones. Then, if there are any remaining upgrades, use dist-upgrade but look to see what will be removed. If you don't like what it's telling you, don't do it, try again the next day. This kind of problem is usually resolved in a day or two, as the rest of the sub-system is finished and uploaded to the repositories. You might even try again after an hour or so, as you might have been unlucky enough to try upgrading while a complete and consistent sub-system upload to your mirror was in progress. If you use Synaptic in its default state, it will offer the dist-upgrade. Deselect the 'upgrade' selections, and put back a few individually. At each step, Synaptic will tell you what it wants to remove, so you can backtrack and end up with only the upgrades that don't remove anything else. You can do this with aptitude in interactive mode, but I find Synaptic quicker. Sometimes the problem package is obvious from the list of things to be removed. I generally use aptitude safe-upgrade, then full-upgrade, and if there are any problems which I don't want to wait to have fixed, switch to Synaptic. A couple of times, the iterative procedure with Synaptic has allowed all upgrades to be completed, when there was a correct order for upgrading some things and aptitude hadn't found it. Occasionally, something gets removed permanently from unstable, and will never be in any future stable. You can keep the old version, sometimes forever, but it will never be upgraded. In this case, you should find an alternative. -- Joe -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20140918091631.56ba8...@jresid.jretrading.com
