[Synaptic-devel] Trouble with updating xfree86

[Andreas Schmidt]

Hi,

yesterday I set to work seriously to upgrade xfree86 on my unstable-box  
from 4.2.1 to 4.3.0. Since it came out, I've been afraid I'd s... up my  
system because of unresolved dependencies.

On the command-line,
address@hidden:/home/pc# apt-get install --dry-run xbase-clients xfonts- 
100dpi xfonts-75dpi xfonts-base  xfonts-scalable xfree86-common xfs   
xfwp xlibs xlibs-dev xnest xserver-common  xserver-xfree86 xspecs xterm  
xutils  xvfb
would work OK. However, that's what I only discovered yesterda. Before,  
when I marked all these packages for update in synaptic, I got warned  
that an exceedingly huge number of packages (Gnome/GTK-related) would  
be removed. Marking each of the xfree86-packages individually led to  
xbase-clients being the single package that caused all that havoc.

Apparently, the packages marked for removal depended on libice6 or  
xlibs (>4.1.0); so their dependency was fulfilled by xlibs 4.2.1.  
xbase-clients (4.3.0) depends on xlibs (4.3.0). Somehow, when marking  
all xfree86-packages it doesn't seem to get through that the xlibs- 
dependency still is fulfilled, resulting in the mass-removal.

Finally, when selecting all packages of the xfree86-packages except  
xbase-clients, xbase-clients is listed among the packages that will be  
upgraded and nothing is marked to be removed.

I'm not sure what is wrong there, but as passing all of the xfree86- 
related packages to apt-get install works I guess synaptic is behaving  
a bit...unexpectedly. :-)

Best regards,

Andreas