Re: [PLUG] debian stable & 2.4?

[Darxus@chaosreigns.com]

On 01/27, Will Dyson wrote:
> 2) Frequently, a package will make it into testing, but some of its 
> dependancies will not (as bugs are found and fixed in unstable, the 
> waiting period starts over). You then find that you can't install or 
> update that package. This problem can be worked around by allowing 
> specific packages from unstable to be installed. Damned if I can find 
> the description of how to do that, though.

Someone really should start documenting how to beat Debian into submission
when it doesn't listen.  When dealing with testing, and more often
with unstable, there are... things you can do to make it work when
dependencies break.

In this particular case, where you're running testing, and you attempt to
do, say, an apt-get dist-upgrade, and it tells you that it can't because
one of the packages has unment dependencies, because those dependencies
haven't yet made it out of unstable into testing, I have put the packages
on hold to allow others to upgrade.

I recently had this problem with the libsdl package I had installed.
I tried to do an apt-get dist-upgrade in testing, and it said it
wouldn't because it depended on other packages which it couldn't find in
the archive.  The package I had installed was, I believe, "libsdl1.2".
I ended up putting the package on hold, like this:

echo "libsdl1.2 hold" | dpkg --set-selections

It then allowed me to apt-get dist-upgrade.

Later, when I had more time to look at the problem, I ended up removing
the package, and then installing the new one, and it worked.  It was
less of a dependancy issue, and more of a package conflict issue.

Stuff does break on debian testing and unstable, but I would say it
doesn't break often or badly in testing.  When it does (assuming your
email still works), paste all of your output in email to either the
debian-users mailing list, or this one.

I still run my person server on debian stable, and my workstation on
debian testing.

-- 
"It's never too late to panic."
http://www.ChaosReigns.com

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