aptitude; First do no harm.

[Leonard Chatagnier]

--- On Mon, 10/19/09, James Michael Fultz <croooow at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: James Michael Fultz <croooow at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: aptitude; First do no harm.
> To: ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
> Date: Monday, October 19, 2009, 3:02 PM
> * 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.
> 
Must be something else wrong.  I just installed openntpd with aptitude:
sudo aptitude install openntpd and it simply installed that one package as expected.  I'm on kubuntu desktop though but have used aptitude primarily but also use synaptic, apt-get and most of the other gui.  Using simulate is a good idea that might show something why packages are being removed. You might also open aptitude in gui mode(type just aptitude in a cli) and look for broken packages to fix and look at the depends on openntpd.  HTH
Leonard Chatagnier
lenc5570 at sbcglobal.net