[vox-tech] aptitude problems after a couple dist-upgrades

[Ken Bloom]

On Wed, Sep 20, 2006 at 10:40:55AM -0700, Dylan Beaudette wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> just installed Debian Sarge from some old install media, and performed a 
> dist-upgrade twice to get to the unstable distribution.
> 
> however, i am not able to install a couple of new packages, namely kde:
> 
> #aptitude install kde
> 
> [....]
> 
> The following packages are BROKEN:
>   kcontrol kdepim-kfile-plugins kpilot 
> 
> any ideas on how to fix this? 

Yeah, wait a couple days. These kinds of things happen in unstable,
and they usually sort themselves out soon enough. If a package stays
that way for a *long* time (i.e. more than a week), then your best bet
would be to fix the bug that's causing it, and submit the fix to the
bug tracking system. Sometimes that's easier said than done.

> also i noticed that this machine calls itself 'debian testing/unstable' -- 
> what exactly does this mean?

The machine calls itself testing/unstable (in /etc/issue) because
the package containing /etc/issue (base-files) starts out in unstable,
and then migrates unchanged into testing according to certain rules
(which have been discussed here before). To avoid having to create
some kind of special case for it, they just say "testing/unstable" so
that it covers both. When they get close to release, they'll change it
to say "4.0" or something (so that it will migrate correctly into the
stable distribution, unchanged ), and as soon as they release they'll
change it right back to "testing/unstable". One of the little quirks
of the stable/testing/unstable system.

You're running whatever version of the distribution is listed in
/etc/apt/sources.list.

--Ken Bloom

-- 
Ken Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/