I've broken apt

[SpookyEddy]

Hi,

I just tried to install a deb (gpgkeys) using dpgk & now when I run a normal apt-get dist-upgrade it tries to update hundreds of packages ???

Slacker:/etc/apt# apt-get dist-upgrade
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Calculating Upgrade... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  fbset libgd2-noxpm 
The following packages have been kept back
  kernel-package 
194 packages upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1  not upgraded.
Need to get 137MB of archives. After unpacking 22.6MB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] n
Abort.

I am running woody & it was all up to date & working fine till I had to go around a mess it up :

So.. any ideas how I can get apt working again & figure out whats going on, I don't think letting it run that update is a good idea.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

ed

well likely that one package you installed has caused a string of dependency needs. Sometimes it does not take much. While what is currently there may run the app just fine apt wants to bring all pacjkages related to it up to that current standard.

what you can try is removing the package you installed and see if it still causes the same dependency issues.

[SpookyEddy]

Thanks for the ideas, this is really starting to worry me

I have removed the package but still no luck, it seems to want to upgrade all sorts of stuff to newer versions - even though before I broke it they were all up to date. Shortly before this all went wrong I may have typed "apt-get -f install", could this be the problem?

Any more help/ideas would be great.

Thanks

ed

possibly or could it be that your sources.list is now pointing to testing which is now actively updated again. It was frozen before they moved woody to stable.

EDIT: BTW you haven't broken apt at all it is working fine it just wants to do more than you think it should be doing right now. if it were indeed broken you wouldn't have even gotten to the point where it polled the sources for package info.

[SpookyEddy]

hmm well Testing is still the same as Stable at the moment (certainly not 100+ packages different ).

Perhaps I should have said apt is confused not broken, but it was 4 am & I didn't really give it much thought.

Anyway.. still can't figure this out, it definately seems to want to upgrade to packages that are newer than those in stable or testing (I checked against another machine). The only thing I can think is that I have somehow told it to upgrade packages that were on hold by default, is that a possibility?

Thanks for the help.

ed