Re: catastrophe - but how? Aptitude goes mad

[Lisi Reisz <lisi.reisz@gmail.com>]

On Friday 01 July 2016 13:19:46 Brian wrote:
> On Fri 01 Jul 2016 at 00:37:32 +0100, Lisi Reisz wrote:
> > On Friday 01 July 2016 00:14:34 Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> > > On Fri, 01 Jul 2016, Lisi Reisz wrote:
> > > > assumed, it wasn't asked to remove anything.  It was asked to add one
> > > > thing which in now way depended on anything removed.  That is what
> > > > puzzles me.  And
> > >
> > > I don't know why it would do that.  Well, it shouldn't ask about
> > > deleting one thousand packages if you asked it to install one
> > > package... but it certainly is supposed to ask about installing that
> > > one package *after* informing you that it would remove one thousand
> > > packages in order to do that.
> >
> > Yes.  I expressed myself badly.  I was having difficulty seeing the
> > screen and therefore typing.  If I ask for one thing and it asks no
> > questions at all I expect it to install only one thing.  If it wants to
> > install a load of dependencies, or, even worse, remove half the system, I
> > expect it ot ask me!!!
> >
> > > Note that I am assuming neither of you did "aptitude -y", that would be
> > > bad and would also explain what happened.
> >
> > I used bash's history to confirm that I had had no such mental
> > aberration.  It confirmed that, after the root screen prompt, I had
> > typed:
> > aptitude install libreoffice-grammarcheck-en-gb
> > and nothing else - well, <enter>, of course.
>
> The outcome of the command may very well be due to previous history
> during during the upgrade. You really need to look at that before
> concluding it is aptitude itself which is at fault. /var/log/apt is
> the place to scour for clues.

<gulp>

Thanks, again, Brian.

When I next have access to the physical computer (of which more anon) I will 
try to copy that so that the wisdom of the list can tell me what is wrong 
with it.

Meanwhile, I am not going near that box with aptitude when I do get access!!

Aptitude has served me well, reliably and faithfully for 14 years.  I was not 
rushing to blame it in this case.

But until I do find out what went wrong, I shall be a little nervous of 
aptitude. :-(

My having got a little further with my next project would help here.  Having, 
thanks to this list, got ssh going reliably over my private net (isn't 
avahi-daemon wonderful?!) I must get it going over the net.  If I could get 
in that way, I could just copy the log over.

But I can't get physical access, possibly for a week.

Lisi