I made a big mistake: dependency hell!

[Dotan Cohen]

2011/1/24 Johan Grönqvist <johan.gronqvist at gmail.com>:
> 2011-01-23 21:29, Dotan Cohen skrev:
>>
>> In trying to install Digikam 1.7 on Kubuntu 10.10 I got myself into
>> dependency hell. I was installing some Natty packages with dpkg.
>
>> When I try to "apt-get install -f" in a virtual
>> terminal it wants to remove almost everything!
>>
>>  I tried removing the last packages
>> installed as listed in /var/lib/dpkg/info, [...] but aptitiude and apt-get
>> both want to remove 200
>> packages even when I try to remove just those ten or so.
>
> Why does it want to remove all those packages?
>

I did not know, until a few minutes ago. That was quite the problem,
the dependencies had gotten so complicated that only a mentat could
decipher them.

Doesn't Thufir Hawat frequent this list?


> I usually use the interactive aptitude, because that gives me a preview of
> the planned changes, and (more importantly) gives me the ability to change
> things there. In that preview, you should be able to see that it wants to
> remove lots of packages, but also see why, and you could mark that you want
> to keep them instead of having them removed.
>

So do I, I love aptitude to death. But the problem was that the list
was going off the screen, and even with GNU Screen I could not scroll
it as aptitude was waiting for cli input and that breaks Screen. Then
I discovered that you can press "e" in the interactive prompt to be
taken to an ncurses full-screen app! I couldn't believe it, it even
has a minesweeper game built in! With this interface I was able to
figure out the root of the issue, which is a missing core KDE
component. I configured the KDE Beta repo to pull it in, and it will
upgrade me to KDE 4.6 which is fine. It's all working now in the
background.


> Do you know if a meta-package could have been removed? This could make your
> system think that the 200 packages are no longer needed, because they where
> installed only because the meta-package needed them. The main candidate here
> might be kubuntu-desktop, so make sure you have that installed, or install
> it again.
>

That's a good thought. I can't check now as I'm tying up the resource,
but I'll look through the logs afterwards to see if that was the
issue. Though, I seem to recall that one could in fact remove the
meta-packages safely.

-- 
Dotan Cohen

http://gibberish.co.il
http://what-is-what.com