GrapefruiTgirl

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Hi BCarey. I have since tried that too. I backed up the contents and deleted/recreated the folder. Also I tried setting a different fresh folder entirely, and still no go.

BCarey

Which folder? How do you recreate /var/log/packages? What I did was look through /var/log/packages where I spotted a number of duplicate packages, which I then removed with "removepkg".

Brian

mago

I upgraded to slackpkg-2.35 and everything works fine.

You might want to go to http://ufpr.dl.sourceforge.net/sourc...2-noarch-1.tgz to get it.

GrapefruiTgirl

Brian, I just copied all the crap from /var/cache/ to a spare location, and made a brand new packages folder. Then I uninstalled Slackpkg and deleted any traces of it. And then reinstalled it fresh, configured the mirror, set up the configuration etc..
And it still did the same thing right off the get-go. It would UPDATE itself as far as the text file lists and stuff, but then I'd try to do an patches-upgrade, and the weirdness began afresh :s

Anyhow, I am going to check out the new one mentioned by mago, and get back to you'se.
(Incidentally, why does sourceforge not provide MD5's ??)

erklaerbaer

try /var/log/packages

GrapefruiTgirl

LOL that's what I get for computing late at night!!
Erklaerbaer, thanks for that clarification!! I will try that today and update you guys
Thanks again

rworkman

Um, maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but you *really* do NOT want to remove /var/log/packages.

GrapefruiTgirl

Hi Rob, no not remove it, but check for duplicates and remove/uninstall any duplicate packages.
Atleast, that's what I will be trying.
Seems to me I already looked once for dupes, and didn't see any, but I will be looking again.

rworkman

Ah okay. I know slackpkg is supposed to do that for you. Maybe that code is where the bug lies...

erklaerbaer

........

GrapefruiTgirl

You guys are great Thanks for all the advice, and for your patience everyone!
I went to /var/log/packages and did indeed see two versions of bash, so... I started up pkgtool, selected 'remove packages' and then scrolled through the entire list. I found a half dozen or so duplicate packages, of different versions, so I selected "remove" for each older version of the dupes.
I tried Slackpkg again, and it started to work --- it at least tried to download, but it was trying to upgrade me to four older packages, that did not exist on the mirror (I checked manually). So I changed mirrors, Updated slackpkg again, and again ran 'upgrade-all'. And it WORKED! It located about 10 things for which there were new releases or patches, so I picked a few, downloaded them, and installed them without incident.
Yay!! Thanks again peoples -- I guess the question remaining is how/why the duplicates are slipping through the net..

rworkman

There a few possible ways that duplicate packages could end up installed, but the most common is by using installpkg(8) rather than upgradepkg(8) [1] to install newer versions of packages already installed.
On that note, other than a few exceptions [2], a good way to upgrade large numbers of packages is with the --install-new option to upgradepkg(8); basically, this causes it to upgrade existing packages, and if a package is not currently installed, the --install-new switch installs it.

[1] Basically, what upgradepkg does is rename the original package, install the contents of the new package, and remove the original (renamed) package. Any files that exist in two or more packages will not be removed, so only the files that are not present in the new package will be removed by this.

[2] One notable exception is installing a new kernel package - it's usually a good idea to keep your old kernel image and modules around at least until you confirm that the new one will boot properly. Another exception might be packages that add custom kernel modules (we split the madwifi build into a libs/utils portion and a driver portion at SlackBuilds.org for this very reason) - you often want to leave the driver for kernel X in place while also installing it for kernel Y.

Back on the subject of slackpkg, I'll let PiterPunk know the outcome of this next time I talk to him; I'm almost certain that he doesn't monitor this forum.

rworkman

Does anyone still have the /var/log/packages directory in its original state (when it was causing this problem)? If so, PiterPunk would like for you to tar it up and mail it to him. If you don't have it still, but you do recall the packages that were duplicates, look in /var/log/removed_packages and pluck the relevant entries out of there - and explain why you're giving him those instead of /var/log/packages. There's a potential solution in the works, but the exact implementation has yet to be determined, and we're going to want testing with some configurations that actually exposed the bug. Be sure to advise the version of slackpkg you're using (although I *strongly* recommend that you reproduce the bug in 2.52 if you want to help - 2.02 is old now).

PiterPUNK's mail address is listed in /etc/slackpkg/slackpkg.conf