New Debian leader seeks more innovation within project (ITWire) [LWN.net]

New Debian leader seeks more innovation within project (ITWire)

Posted Jul 14, 2013 14:54 UTC (Sun) by peschmae (guest, #32292)
In reply to: New Debian leader seeks more innovation within project (ITWire) by maxiaojun
Parent article: New Debian leader seeks more innovation within project (ITWire)

2. Yes, at least the command line interface works just fine

5. The last time dselect was slightly relevant was over a decade ago, so no.

7. I am, though I would like it to be more visible

9. As part of the debian.net staging infrastructure this has been available for several years and can be found on http://debdelta.debian.net/

10. What do you mean? I usually find it delightfully forthcoming in its feedback.

to post comments

New Debian leader seeks more innovation within project (ITWire)

Posted Jul 14, 2013 18:15 UTC (Sun) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (6 responses)

2. I thought the same until aptitude asked me to remove half of my packages.

5. I also believe so. But I don't understand why "dpkg" still mentions it. "apt-get" still mentions "dselect-upgrade". A grep of source should reveal more mentions.

7. I noted apt-mark when I once skimmed through the source code of APT.

9. This is interesting.

10. Very common case, installing a deb using dpkg and some dependency is not satisfied. Then "apt-get install -f". The problem is, what to do if "apt-get install -f" doesn't work?

New Debian leader seeks more innovation within project (ITWire)

Posted Jul 14, 2013 21:34 UTC (Sun) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (4 responses)

As far as (10) is concerned, I've twice experienced problems with the CLI bindings for the Gtk/Glib libraries in Wheezy which put apt in an unfixable state. The "solution" was to hack the post-removal scripts to not try and delete various "profile" files that either weren't installed to begin with (doubtful) or were removed by those or other packages when trying to complete their own uninstallation.

So, my suggestion is that when things really are messed up, you have to try and persuade the packaging machinery to complete its work and tell apt that it all went well, even if there's a risk that because of a packaging bug something didn't get removed/uninstalled after all.

New Debian leader seeks more innovation within project (ITWire)

Posted Jul 14, 2013 22:28 UTC (Sun) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link] (2 responses)

This is why users should avoid sid. I've never had this sort of problem running stable, but with sid and experimental packages mixed in you sometimes have to unscrew it (and file bug reports).

New Debian leader seeks more innovation within project (ITWire)

Posted Jul 15, 2013 17:13 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (1 responses)

This was a straight Wheezy installation after Wheezy became stable, although the installer was unhappy about completing the package installation step and probably triggered this problem. Still, it shouldn't have left the packages in this inconsistent state.

New Debian leader seeks more innovation within project (ITWire)

Posted Jul 16, 2013 12:01 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

Actually, I think I was mistaken, so I take back the remark about Wheezy being stable at that time: I was using an ISO image from just before the proper release (in the order of a few days, though).

New Debian leader seeks more innovation within project (ITWire)

Posted Jul 16, 2013 9:36 UTC (Tue) by peschmae (guest, #32292) [Link]

I've never seen that on a stable release, only in unstable or testing. But I agree that a "apt-get -f --I_have_super_cow_powers_too" that disregards postinst/postremove script errors would come in handy at times.

New Debian leader seeks more innovation within project (ITWire)

Posted Jul 15, 2013 8:39 UTC (Mon) by peschmae (guest, #32292) [Link]

2. It does that sometimes, doesn't mean you have to let it do that though. I guess those problems are more common with multiarch as the package system seems to require the libraries on the different architectures to have exactly the same version number.

7. It's kind of obscure. I guess I still have to set up aliases to do apt-get install; apt-get mark auto and somesuch things in order to actually start using it regularly.

10. I guess if you are using dpkg manually, you are waay out of line in the first place. Of course that is what all the beginners do to begin with. My experience suggests that a new Debian user needs to wreck an installation or two that way until he/she has acquired enough experience to not do this in the future. There sure is room for improvement in the sense of offering further guidance on what to do if apt-get -f install doesn't work, though that may be difficult to get right as it does depend on a lot of more or less known variables.

New Debian leader seeks more innovation within project (ITWire)

Posted Jul 14, 2013 18:20 UTC (Sun) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (2 responses)

BTW, I never understand one design aspect of "dpkg".

When "dpkg" fail to install a package because of unmet dependencies, why should its internal being changed so that a fix is a must? Why shouldn't the system stay unaltered?

New Debian leader seeks more innovation within project (ITWire)

Posted Jul 16, 2013 11:52 UTC (Tue) by mstone_ (subscriber, #66309) [Link] (1 responses)

some dependencies must be met before the package installation can begin, others can be deferred until a later stage. This makes it easier to avoid dependency loops (where packages indirectly depend on each other to be installed before they can be installed) but does raise the possibility that a package that can't be properly installed can leave another in an inconsistent state. Note that this is usually not catastrophic; the big problems arise when someone freaks out and starts hacking things up manually in an effort to force a solution.

New Debian leader seeks more innovation within project (ITWire)

Posted Jul 17, 2013 10:32 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

>some dependencies must be met before the package installation can begin, others can be deferred until a later stage. This makes it easier to avoid dependency loops

To expand on this: dpkg's principal purpose is more of an internal utility used by packaging tools which handle the dependency resolution. Using dpkg to install packages manually should not be recommended for anyone who doesn't already know how to deal with that, as they're working at a lower than intended level of abstraction.

If you have a .deb which you want to install and have the dependencies checked and resolved for you (assuming they're satisfiable), you would be better off with gdebi. Despite the name, it is not just a Gnome application but also has command-line and KDE interfaces available.