apt-get : No Good :(
 

Being a Gentoo user, am forced to use Debian at work. For the last 2 days, apt-get has driven me crazy. Never able to find any package, and if it does then more often than not it has trouble with unmet dependencies and broken packages.

I've often read nice things about apt, so I'm wondering whether apt is lousy or whether its my sources.list

Anyone know how to get it working nicely like emerge in Gentoo? Perhaps a sources.list that I can use?

Thanks

Can we see your sources.list?

Here it is.

apt IS good but you don't seem to know how to use it. Did you have a look at the apt manual? If you can't find packages it could be your sources.list too.
For those broken dependencies, it seems to me you are using Debian Unstable, Knoppix or something like that!!

Well the first post says that it could be the sources.list. Obviously, I know thats the problem. The question is, how to get a nice sources.list ? The last time I used Debian, I had to spend hours wandering on websites to find repositories to add :/

By the way, I'm using Woody with 2.4.2 and 2.6.9 installed :)
Then why do you think I have the broken dependencies? I need to get a working version of a softare called NAV (metanav.ntnu.no) working in 24 hours and I would like to avoid installing Gentoo on this right now :(

thanks

the positioning after the url has no effect. so all the duplication is a waste of time. get rid of the experimental repository. then do an 'apt update' to inform apt about the sources.list changes.

Well, :-) you have a mix of everything from stable to experimental in your sources.list anyway. Does it really supprise you that you have broken dependencies? By the way the command
helps you locate packages if you are not using a gui(synaptic, kpackage,...)

Get rid of everything but stable and maybe the ones you added. You might want to think about doing a apt-get dist-upgrade since Sarge is the new stable and Woody is outdated. The unmet dependencies are most likely caused by 1) using Woody and 2) having Testing and Unstable repositories. Unstable is very unstable right now. If you need a package that is not in the repositories you can try searching at www.apt-get.org


#Stable Sarge
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib non-free
deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib non-free
#Security Updates Stable
deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free


Update your sources.list then run apt-get update

I put the experimental only after it didn't work without it. I've run 'apt-get update' after every change.

Perhaps one of you guys could just post yours if it works well? For example, right now it won't insall something as common as postgresql, gives the 'unmet dependencies' and 'broken package' error. "Needs libperl5.6 (of which a newer version is already installed) but is not installable."

did you run ?

One sure thing to fix your sources.list is run apt-setup and follow the directions.

ar1, mrcheeks is right when he says:

It is not recommended to have a sources.list that points to many releases at the same time, because apt gets 'jammed' in the long run...

It may be comfortable anyway, but you should comment the lines which point to the releases that you are not using at the moment....

Hope it makes sense...

Juan Javier Martinez
Madrid, Spain
www.juanjaviermartinez.com

Thanks for the reply, people...I knew this post would get replies and get them quick :D

Since I have a short deadline, I'll try to remove the unstable and try, and try apt-setup. Otherwise put in a different drive with Gentoo for showing this NAV program.

just in case you still get dependency errors and want to get rid of the experimental packages already installed on your system try this

since you're running a server I'd recommend using sarge as the default release and add/uncomment the sid repositories in your sources.list just for installing NAV (I think some sid packages are required) without doing apt-get (dist-)upgrade.

this is my sources.list

stimpsonjcat,

thanks for the reply. Can I use the sarge repositories for woody?? I don't think I can change the distro to sarge though, at least not tomorrow when I need to get it done.

By the way, one of the big problems with NAV was that the "deb http://www.cihar.com/debian ./" repository is not working, cannot find the Packages.gz. So I had to install NAV from source, which also gave a lot of trouble because apt-get was not working well and NAV needs so many dependencies. Finally I created a .deb from the RPM.