[Techtalk] apt-get hell?

[Mary]

On Fri, Apr 01, 2005, Katie Bechtold wrote:
> I have a question about a problem on my Debian unstable system.
> 
> # apt-get upgrade
> Reading Package Lists... Done
> Building Dependency Tree... Done
> The following packages have been kept back:
>   apache apache-common apache-ssl apache-utils e2fsprogs libgd2
>   libpng2 libsasl7 util-linux webalizer xlibs
> 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 11 not upgraded.
> 
> My understanding is that, if I want to upgrade the packages that
> have been kept back, I need to 'install' rather than 'upgrade'
> them.  (Correct?)  So:

You want to dist-upgrade rather than upgrade, I think. upgrade will NOT
install new dependencies, it will only install new versions of existing
packages. dist-upgrade will install all available new versions of
existing packages and install extra dependencies if needed.

> A Catch-22, eh?  I give up.  How do I fix this?

That does sound fairly evil :(

My suggestion would be to extract files from the file-rc deb file
directly and just unpack them. Later, you can install the package over
the top of those files so that it gets upgraded etc as normal.

.deb files are, I think, cpio files containing gzipped tar files full of
the actual files to be installed. So you can unpack them using those
tools. I'd consider trying the 'alien' command first though.

-Mary