Did the X11 update do this?

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Apr 12, 2005 at 11:52:36AM -0600, clemens at dwf.com wrote:
> > Unless maybe they're running apt out of cron? Apt sometimes tries to
> > remove packages to get the system into a state it likes.
> Wow...
> Yes this apt WAS run from cron.
> Can you give more details on your statement or point me to some reference.
> Now Im REALLY scared...

I imagine that you're using "dist-upgrade" instead of "upgrade" so that the
automatic apt-get will pull in new dependencies, parse "Obsoletes:", and so
on. The further impact of this is that if a new package conflicts with
something on your system, it will try to remove packages until it gets
things into a non-conflicting state.

Make this not happen *and* still have automatic updates work reliably gets
complicated. If you look at the man page for apt_preferences you'll find one
approach. Alternately, you can look at /etc/apt/rpmpriorities -- packages in
Essential or Required won't be removed even with --assume-yes -- they
require a special extra prompt.

Alterately, you could use yum, which endeavors to be safer and will never
remove packages as part of an upgrade (while still pulling in new
dependencies and solving obsoletes).



-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>