[vox-tech] jay and dselect

[Peter Jay Salzman]

jay, i just had a thought.

did you _just_ install the system?

in debian, sometimes a package won't fully set up because of a
dependency issue, just like with rpm.

unlike rpm, dpkg is very intelligent about such things.  it'll set the
package up for installation as much as it can before bailing.

then when the dependency works itself out, the partially configured
package will automatically configure itself.

very often, the dependency works itself out in the same session.  kind
of like this:

bar is not installed on the system.
foo depends on bar
you start a session to install a bunch of packages including foo and bar.
for some reason (another dependency, perhaps) dpkg tries to install foo
   before bar.
in the same apt-get session, bar gets installed
at this point, foo COULD be installed, but you need to start another
   session.
next time you start an apt-get session, foo will be configured since bar
   is fully installed and configured.


this is why, when you upgrade from potato to woody, very often you need
to do something like this:

cat /etc/apt/sources.list | sed -e 's/stable/testing/g' > tmp
mv tmp /etc/apt/sources.list
dselect update
apt-get dist-upgrade
while (error messages) {
	apt-get dist-upgrade
}

in other words, you keep doing apt-get dist-upgrade until no more error
messages about dependencies appear.  dpkg is smart enough that they WILL
get worked out.  it might take 3-5 tries to fully complete.

btw, dependencies aren't the only thing that can cause this.  a full
/var partition can also cause this sort of thing.  in that case, you can
do an

apt-get clean

to remove packages that were downloaded to your system but have already
been installed.

pete

ps- and for heaven's sake, stop reinstalling your system!   :-)