aptitude; First do no harm.

[James Michael Fultz]

* Martin McCormick <martin at dc.cis.okstate.edu> [2009-10-19 10:01 -0500]:
> I am one of the administraters of a Ubuntu-Server 
> 8.10 _Intrepid Ibex_ - Release i386 (20081028.1)
> system. I went to install openntpd on it and aptitude wanted to
> remove 507 packages which looks to me like maybe sources.list
> needs to point to a different repository now.
[...]
> 0 packages upgraded, 1 newly installed, 507 to remove and 107 not upgraded.
> Need to get 43.6kB of archives. After unpacking 1309MB will be freed.
> Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] n
> Abort.

Is this the first time you've used aptitude on this system?  My
understanding is that you must run 'aptitude update' first.

> I once trashed my Debian system that way and it was because
> sources.list pointed at whatever the current stable version
> happened to be. As long as one was using that version, all was
> well but when the Debian major distribution switched, you can
> guess what happened.

I would suggest trying 'apt-get --simulate install openntpd' and seeing
what it reports.  Again, I think it may be an issue specific to
aptitude.

My understanding is that if you use aptitude, you should use only
aptitude else it doesn't get to consistently track dependencies for its
autoremoval of orphans.

Synaptic, for instance, uses apt-get behind the scenes so doesn't play
well with using aptitude.  However, that is not as likely a problem on a
server where Synaptic is probably not even installed.

> 	The present sources.list on that system is as follows:
> 
> # 
> # deb cdrom:[Ubuntu-Server 8.10 _Intrepid Ibex_ - Release i386 (20081028.1)]/ intrepid main restricted
> 
> #deb cdrom:[Ubuntu-Server 8.10 _Intrepid Ibex_ - Release i386 (20081028.1)]/ intrepid main restricted
> # See http://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes for how to upgrade to
> # newer versions of the distribution.
> 
> deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid main restricted
> deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid main restricted
[...]

Looks fine to me.