On Sat, 21 Dec 2013 22:23:42 +0000 Will Godfrey <willgodfrey(a)musically.me.uk> wrote: apt-get upgrade didn't show what it was planning to do? That sounds unlikely, but if it did happen, then something is very wrong in debian-land. Regards, Philipp

On 12/21/2013 01:41 PM, Philipp Überbacher wrote: Hmmm, haven't had Debian do that to me. A DIST-UPGRADE might have messed things up, but not a straight upgrade. A straight upgrade doesn't install things you don't already have installed unless (I think) they're a dependency of something else you already have installed. IOW, you already had something on there that involved GDM, Gnome3 or PulseAudio. -- David gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community http://dancingtreefrog.com

On 12/21/2013 07:07 PM, hermann meyer wrote: Hmm, have been doing just straight upgrades for many years now and haven't encountered an unstable system state. So far, if a straight upgrade has hit a situation where an upgraded package requires some new library with a different name, it lets me know and I can deal with it. I've done dist-upgrades in the past, and successfully had them hose installed systems, so I prefer periodic upgrades, generally sticking to only upgrading specific apps I use. But I run Aptosid, with turns Debian Sid into a very stable system. Aptosid does a good job of vetting package updates. I know a while ago they were blocking all Gnome updates because various core Gnome packages were in transition. Of course, the most important part of any upgrade is to make a good backup of the system partition before the upgrade! -- David gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community http://dancingtreefrog.com

On Sun, 22 Dec 2013 11:21:31 +0100 Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf(a)alice-dsl.net> wrote: On the other hand, Arch does introduce new dependencies all the time. In general the number of dependencies of any given package seems to increase, and the gnome stuff seems to be rather viral. It gets increasingly harder to run a gnome-free graphical system without going to greater length (modifying and building your own GTK3 without colord, polkit, at-spi2-atk etc.). This got annoying enough for me to get rid of gtk3 altogether, but more and more programs are built against it, which limits my options. In my opinion Arch has left the minimal and KISS ways by blindly adopting everything gnome and red hat releases. Regards, Philipp

On Sun, 22 Dec 2013 00:41:07 +0100 Philipp Überbacher <murks(a)tuxfamily.org> wrote: This turned out to be a minor cascade of issues. In the first place I should make the point that I've been using debian exclusively since the days of 'sarge'. My installs all follow the same pattern. I install just the minimum to get a terminal from which I can then install only what I want. I set up an autoloading single user (without admin privs), then pull in just enough of X to be able to run openbox and ROX filer, from then on I build up the audio system I want with (hopefully) the minimum of extraneous crud. I flagged this up here because it was (at that time) fundamentally my music making machine that was borked. As well as hoping for some suggestions as to how it happened I wanted to warn fellow musicians of a possible problem. When I did the upgrade I was somewhat lazy and used synaptic's 'mark all upgrades', with just a cursory glance to check that nothing dramatic was going to happen. At some point in time synaptic itself has gained another, pre-ticked, check box for enabling 'recommends' to be treated as dependencies. Putting a script in the apt directory to stop this action no longer works. Because GDM got installed, my basic start script was completely bypassed, leaving my machine in a totally unfamiliar state. There was no message to say that this was going to happen, and no reason for me to suspect that it might. I have another machine with a fairy similar install so used that to track (and block) exactly the sequence of events. One of the benefits of synaptic over using apt-get or even aptitude is that you can get it to very clearly display just the upgradeable packages, so I did this and one-by-one marked them for upgrade, looking for dependencies. Imagine my astonishment when openbox came up with an apparent dependency of both gnome-session and KDE-session. Gnome-session then had a dependency for GDM and Gnome desktop. To make matters worse, this was Gnome3. Gnome desktop has a dependency on pulse audio (spit). Openbox has absolutely no need for any of this stuff at all. It was an very fast responding and helpful guy on the openbox list who informed me that the debian maintainer had added the Gnome and KDE sessions to the openbox package as 'recommends'. Combined with synaptic (unknown to me) having the box checked for treating recommends as dependencies, the result was inevitable. I've since been informed that the change to the openbox package falls foul of the debian policy document, has been raised on a number of distro lists (but not UCOL) and has now been reverted. P.S. @ Robin Gareus Smug unhelpful side-swipe ... could do better. @ Ralf Mardorf Lots of assumptions there ... most of them wrong. -- Will J Godfrey http://www.musically.me.uk Say you have a poem and I have a tune. Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.

On 12/22/2013 08:30 AM, Will Godfrey wrote: Hmm, just checked my Synaptic setups here. The existing ones from Aptosid on the desktop and the old laptop don't have recommended packages as dependencies. The one on the new laptop (Ubuntu 13.10 just updated a few days ago) is set to treat recommended packages as dependencies. Thanks for mentioning it, just unchecked it there! Sneaky little thing for the Synaptic maintainers to do. -- David gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community http://dancingtreefrog.com