Re: [PLUG] dpkg help needed

[John Von Essen <john@essenz.com>]

Why can't debian and other distro's just steal the ports system design  
from FreeBSD and call it a day.

My experience with debian apt-get is that after enough time passes and  
enough pkg's are installed, it's guaranteed to get screwed up so bad -  
its unfixable. At that point you have re-install the OS and start over  
from scratch.

RHEL's channel rpms are nice, but if you dont have entitlement, it can  
be pain downloading them manually.

Though... Nothing holds a candle to the FreeBSD ports system.

-John

On Feb 8, 2006, at 7:14 PM, Stephen Gran wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 01:41:12PM -0500, Art Alexion said:
> > Since upgrading from KDE 3.4.3 to KDE 3.5.1, I have lost tellico, a  
> > nice
> > collection manager.  It won't 'make' from source, and the debs fail
> > dependencies.
> >
> > I have found, however, that despite the dpkg errors, it runs.  But  
> > dpkg
> > thinks it is broken, so other apt stuff complains.
> >
> > I tried installing with 'dpkg --install --force-depends-version', but
> > its as if I never used the --force option.  As this seems to be  
> > working,
> > what do I need to do to clean up the apt database?
>
> I've said it before, but ir bears repeating:  the dpkg --force options
> are only to be used in desperation, and only when fully aware of the
> consequences.  It's usually easier to file a bug pointing pointing out  
> a
> stupid dependency than it is to force these things to work.
>
> That being said, `apt-get -f install` will tell you what it thinks the
> right course of action is.  Probably, in this case, it is to remove the
> offending package that you force installed.
>
> The way I would try to force this back into a working order (if an
> apt-get source tellico
> apt-get build-dep tellico
> cd tellico-* && dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot
> really won't fix it, which is a bug as well :)
>
> would be to take the deb, and extract all the important bits from it:
>
> mkdir tellico
> dpkg -x tellico_$version.deb tellico
> dpkg -e tellico_$version.deb tellico
>
> then fix it:
> ldd tellico/path/to/tellico (check all libraries really are resolvable)
> $EDITOR tellico/DEBIAN/control (adjust dependencies)
>
> Then rebuild it:
> dpkg -b tellico tellico_$current-version+1_$arch.deb
>
> What you want to do is make sure that you really aren;t forcing a bad
> depends by ensuring the libraries really are all resolvable by ldd,
> otherwise you're just asking for trouble anyway.  If that part is fine,
> fix the dependencies in the control file, and then repack the deb, but
> with an incremented version number (so if the available version is
> 3.2-1, go for 3.2-1.1 or something)  This will ensure that your local
> copy isn;t upgraded until a new Debian version appears, which should
> hopefully fix the dependencies anyway.
>
> When you are all done this ordeal, do me a favor and do file two bugs:
> tellico: fails to build from source (include build failure logs)
> tellico: stupid dependencies (analysis good, otherwise ldd output)
>
> The FTBFS bug is severity serious, the other is probably severity
> normal.  One of Debian's major problems going forward is that we (and  
> by
> we I mean me as well) allow upstream's broken library handling to
> dictate quite a lot of how we manage dependencies.  Debian's libtool  
> and
> ld are smarter than most other distros, and we need to be more  
> agressive
> about fixing bugs caused by bad dt.NEEDED sections inherited from bad
> toolchains.
>
> Sorry for the rant, and I hope that is otherwise helpful,
> --  
>   
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> ---
> |  Stephen Gran                  | "In the fight between you and the    
>     |
> |  steve@lobefin.net             | world, back the world."  --Frank  
> Zappa  |
> |  http://www.lobefin.net/~steve |                                      
>     |
>   
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> ---
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