Ladies & Gents,

I have an interesting problem. The other day I updated my system with kpackage. I run kde. I am also running debian testing (squeeze). I had already made the change to sources.list for squeeze some time ago. This also only seams to affect my lappy which is running the 64.

When I did the last update I had the sources file open through the access method in kpackage. I don't recall the exact sequence of steps that I took at that time but I think I did some updating with the file open and some changes made to it. Don't recall what those changes were. As I remember I was adding a source for freenx for desktop sharing over ethernet. Never did install it.

The problem is that now when I try to look at the sources through kpackage there is nothing there. The sources.list file is there and it still contains every thing it did before, along with the changes I made to it. But it is not accessible through kpackage for editing. If I update the package list it works just like normal.

I have looked at the config files for kpackage but don't see any way to change where it looks for the sources.list file.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks.

I would use aptitude to purge and re-install kpackage..

Thanks farslayer

I had not given any thought about purging kpackage and doing a reinstall. The malfunction in kpackage is not critical for me. I generally mod my sources through a regular text editor. There is also not generally much reason to change it in the first place.

I think I will follow your advice and see what happens when I get a chance and have nothing more important to work on.

Thanks again

It's been awhile.

I got around to purging kpackage the other day and reinstalling and that didn't change anything.

I would suggest using a different package management front end.. since apparently (from the bug reports) no-one cares about kpackage anymore, and most distros are preparing to yank it..

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=523450

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=169589

Thanks,

Guess I will have to check out other apt-get front ends to see what is out there. I have used kpackage almost exclusively since I started using linux. Since I run kde I don't know what I might use with it.

I am not sure that is that big a deal because kpackage seams to work ok. It is just that I can't edit the sources from within kpackage, otherwize it seams to work fine.

Thanks again.

Synaptic seems to be the most popular GUI front end these days.

As far as I can see the issue is more lack of support for kpackage. The Author no longer maintains it. No one else has taken up maintaining it. and no one on the Debian team in interested in maintaining the package. I also see a lot of bugs reported against kpackage, most unconfirmed but then if no-one is maintaining it who is going to confirm them ?

If you learn aptitude from the command line, you'll probably discover that the GUI front ends are slow, unresponsive and just gets in the way.. honest !!

FYI:

Solution

I found out what happened. Somehow the permissions on sources.list got changed to allow only root access and no read access for any one else. So kpackage couldn't read the file. After I corrected that (# chmod 644) it went back to working like it should.

Thanks