[vox-tech] Debian Unstable - apt strangeness

[Matt Roper]

On Fri, Aug 13, 2004 at 03:29:45PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
...
> I think you're misinterpreting:  dpkg is merely saying that no package
> matching that ASCII pattern is _installed_.  dpkg knows nothing about 
> available packages (as indicated in /var/lib/apt/lists/*Packages and
> /var/lib/dpkg/available).  It knows only about the contents of
> /var/lib/dpkg/status -- the "installed packages" database.
...

Although that's the way it *should* work, I'm afraid it doesn't
actually work out that nicely.  The missing piece of the puzzle is that
if you use the 'dselect' tool, your /var/lib/dpkg/available file will
get updated to also include information about all the packages that you
don't have installed, but that exist in apt.  Running 'dselect update'
or selecting 'update' from the dselect menu will perform all the actions
normally done by 'apt-get update' and then also merge the information
about available packages into the dpkg database.  So although dpkg still
doesn't know anything about how to fetch these packages, it is aware of
their names and will show them if you do a 'dpkg -l <pattern>' query.

I have no idea why dselect throws all the apt information into the dpkg
database instead of just working from the apt database directly; it's
certainly non-intuitive and breaks the whole apt/dpkg layering scheme.

Pete - try running 'dselect update' and then do your 'dpkg -l "*gimp*"'
query.  I suspect all the packages will show up then.



Matt

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