[NBLUG/talk] apt-net gone nuts

[Jeremy Turner]

On Sun, 2003-06-29 at 15:42, Steve wrote:
> Something weird happened last night,  As you all may know I am new
> to Debian, and I decided to go with the test tree for apt-get.  One of
> my favorite aps to run in Linux is X-Chat, so I did apt-get install xchat

Did you apt-get update before you installed xchat?  I also almost always
throw in a -u in there.  This shows you all packages that will be
installed/upgraded/removed.

> apt-get said something about removing some files, looked like KDE stuff.
>  I wasn't sure why it wanted to remove the files, being I'm a newbie
> with debian, I trusted apt-get to 'do the right thing'. So I hit enter.
> apt-get did its thing.

Be very very careful with apt-get because sometimes it will want to
uninstall packages in order to resolve dependencies.

This is the trick of using unstable or testing in debian (more with
testing in my experience).  You may find that package X needs package Y,
but packages A, B and C need package Y in order to work right. 
Upgrading package X could cause packages A, B, and C to not work right.

The other thing to think about is different package names for different
versions.  If you had the image program gimp1.2 installed and a new
package was released for the new version of gimp1.3, you might need to
uninstall gimp1.2 for the new one to work right.

> I was happy to find that it installed the latest version of xchat, set
> it all up and chatted with my friends a little.  I now had need to use
> my win2k system on the same box, so I rebooted.. did
> some windoze stuff and then re-booted back into debian.
> 
> Well.. startx was gone along with most of the KDE stuff.
>  Why did apt-get install xchat remove startx and KDE?  this is nuts.
> so I did apt-get install kde and it re-installed all of kde and startx.

I wonder if xchat was still there.  I'm not quite sure why it did that. 
I thought startx was a function of xfree86, but maybe not.  I don't know
why xchat would want to remove parts of kde.  I am running unstable, and
I apt-get install xchat and it only wanted to also install xchat-common.

> Anyone know why apt-get went nuts on me this way?  Is this a hazard of
> running off of the test tree instead of the stable tree?  

To be honest, yes.  There will always be hazards, just like the last
time I loaded a RedHat laptop and CUPS wasn't included, so when I went
to install it, RPM said that it needed the cups package as a
dependency.  But I digress.

When a stable version is released, the only updates are basically
security fixes, but no new major revisions are thrown in.  Packages play
well with each other.  But every user needs to read carefully when using
apt so that they understand why packages are being removed.  It doesn't
hurt to say no or CTRL-C out of it.

> I really like the test tree, it seems to have stuff that is more up
> to date, where are stable seems to be a little out dated. 

It really is a toss-up between a stable (and I mean *stable*) system and
a cutting edge system.  If you run a whole bunch of beta programs on
your machine (win2k or otherwise) you'd need to watch out.  However,
keeping up-to-date on debianplanet.org works for watching out for
upgrading pitfalls.

> Anyways I wanted to share this with you guys.. This frustrated me enought
> to consider going back to RedHat :) but I went to bed and got over it lol!

Friends don't let friends go back to RedHat. ;) j/k  RedHat has a slick
installer, I must admit.

Jeremy

-- 
Jeremy Turner <jeremy at linuxwebguy.com>
The LinuxWebGuy