Bad idea of the day: upgrading to Lenny with aptitude
I like aptitude. Okay, I just understand 10% of its features and I can’t live without apt-get (e.g. apt-get source) or apt-cache (e.g. apt-cache search) but for resolving broken dependencies it’s heaven-sent. It just seems like upgrading to Lenny using aptitude (I just learned about “U” to toggle an update - I’ve always used apt-get for that purpose) is a bad idea at this moment. Thanks to Daniel et al for this great piece of software anyway. Just if you upgrade to Lenny I’d recommend apt-get for the moment.
It’s now four hours later and I managed to forcefully install slapd’s dependencies, recover the Samba LDAP schemas and get over all kinds of weird error messages. Bacula failed to upgrade the database (I swear it had worked before with dbconfig-common) so all I had was my emergency afbackup. Not to mention that I had to work on the server console because due to lack of LDAP I couldn’t fix that from my laptop. Do I need to mention that my TFT monitor at my server just died today? Don’t think so.
If you like “apt-cache search”, try “aptitude search”. I don’t think it has a source command, though.
Kelly Clowers
23 Aug 08 at 4:43 pm
My suspicion (I don’t have enough information yet to know what’s happening) is that this is caused by code that’s shared between all apt frontends. If aptitude is going wrong and apt-get isn’t, it might be because aptitude is more aggressive about removing unused packages. That is, apt-get *would* do this if it tried to upgrade slapd at the same time that it removed libldap-2.3-0, but it doesn’t remove unused stuff by default, so it doesn’t hit this case. If that turns out to be what’s happening, you might be able to avoid this particular case by passing “-o Aptitude::Delete-Unused=true” on the command-line, but you could still be bitten in a different upgrade that happens to create the same situation.
But as I said, I don’t really know what’s happening here, so all I’m doing is guessing.
Daniel Burrows
23 Aug 08 at 7:25 pm