Help--potato upgrade flakey with apt-get/dselect
I apologize up front for the length of this post, but am trying to max the
info for brave souls who may be able to help me...
An upgrade initially using apt-get then finished with deselect has left an
unknown number of packages possibly not upgraded. Slink-->potato, BTW.
The long story: (the big questions are listed at the end, FWIW)
An upgrade which ran all night/day has apparently not updated all packages.
After initial download-only, I reran apt-get dist-upgrade and most packages
installed seemingly with no problems. Then I noted flakey operation of
gnome under X, and somehow surmised that the system had been unpacked but not
configured. I didn't know about "dpkg --configure -a" at the time, but got
the idea of using deselect.
It updated the package lists via apt. I looked at the list (full of U's)
and decided to add the 2.2.10 kernel package. In addition to its
dependencies, others were noted for other packages. I accepted them, as I
have no way to tell the validity of the choices made. Deselect got a newer
version of the unstable lists as well, forcing a further download of 36 Mb.
Installation seemed to go well, with the unconfigured packages dropping to
2 from 200+.
Attempted setup of the kernel package (which dselect never unpacked) failed
at "make menuconfig" concerning ncurses. I tried to remove the older
ncurses3.4 package (since the latest was also installed), but dpkg balked.
That's when I discovered that sysutils and taper had not been upgraded,
apparently. I expect others are the same way.
1) Is there a way to get this to work? Can I redo the apt-get with all the
files I downloaded, and simply force every package to be redone?? I have a
feeling that something weird happened when I went over to dselect.
2) And why didn't the dist-upgrade not configure things initially? Would
"dpkg --configure -a" be a better choice if it happened again?
3) How do I deal with the ncurses issue. Are any of the potato deb's
dependent on the older ncurses3.4?
4) perl-5.004 vs. perl-5.005 ??? Do I trash the former or not? Dselect
wouldn't let me remove it... (something to do with those un-upgraded
packages??)
Should the first step in dselect been to configure packages, without any of
the other steps??
Thanks a bunch for any thoughts!!
Kenward
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