apt-get system reinstallation

[sktsee]

On Wed, 2008-07-09 at 09:35 -0700, NoOp wrote:
> On 07/09/2008 09:22 AM, NoOp wrote:
> 
> > 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1193 reinstalled, 0 to remove
> > and 0 not upgraded.
> > Need to get 45.4MB/486MB of archives. After unpacking 0B will be used.
> > Writing extended state information... Error!
> > E: I wasn't able to locate file for the nxclient package. This might
> > mean you need to manually fix this package.
> > ggserver2 at userver:~$
> > 
> > NX is the only package that I have on that system that I installed with
> > dpkg, so I'll blow it out and try the command again. In the interim,
> > perhaps sktsee or someone can advise of a similar command with exceptions?
> > 
> > 
> 
> Well, after removing NX it seemed to be going well until this part:
> 
> Fetched 45.4MB in 4min46s (158kB/s)
> 
> E: Couldn't configure pre-depend coreutils for debianutils, probably a
> dependency cycle.
> A package failed to install.  Trying to recover:
> Reading package lists... Done
> Building dependency tree
> Reading state information... Done
> Reading extended state information
> Initializing package states... Done
> Building tag database... Done
> ggserver2 at userver:~$
> 
> 
Yep, now we are getting into upgrade-manager territory. Apt and aptitude
usually follow the least complicated dependency path possible, so
accommodating certain packages with pre-dependencies is probably going
to require manual intervention. I suppose it could all be done one
command line, but I think you would have know about each problematic
package and delve into aptitude's more esoteric settings to get the job
done. Guess that's one reason why Ubuntu strongly suggests using
upgrade-manager for system upgrades instead of apt-get dist-upgrade.

I'll look at it later on and see if I can't derive a search pattern for
those packages and put them in keep: status. Unless the system is really
screwed up, it's unlikely that you'd need to re-install a package like
libc6, or coreutils. Meanwhile, you can selectively keep packages from
being touched by aptitude by appending the package name and a colon
after it on the aptitude command line. To keep aptitude from messing
with the package you mentioned in your earlier post, use "sudo aptitude
reinstall ~i nxclient:" Aptitude will ignore it and it won't appear in
the list of packages for reinstall.

It does look like all the packages for installation that need to be
downloaded were fetched, though. Were any packages re-installed, or are
they all in a hold state? What does "sudo dpkg --configure --pending"
output?

-- 
sktsee