Aptitude suggests lots of deletions

[slackcub]

I recently discovered aptitude (new kubuntu user as of 2 months ago) and am liking it as an alternative to apt-get. I just have one question. Why is it suggesting that I remove over 100 packages, most of which are lib* packages? I did some searching on here and found that this seems to be a pretty common issue, but I haven't found any solutions. Is there a way to turn off the full resolver without completely destroying dependency resolution? Or is there a way to tell it that I don't like any of it's suggestions and to ignore them? Thanks for any help you can give me!

David

[woodsmoke]

Hi
PLEASE wait until somebody that is more knowledgable about this kind of thing pops by to post a useful answer.

But, here is my rather not useful answer. I have seen that a few times myself. And it was usually when I was going to remove a component "here" and it had depends "over there".

You would really help the responders if you could give a couple of specific examples.

woodsmoke

[oldos2er]

I recently discovered aptitude (new kubuntu user as of 2 months ago) and am liking it as an alternative to apt-get. I just have one question. Why is it suggesting that I remove over 100 packages, most of which are lib* packages? David

Can you post the terminal output so we can see?

[SecretCode]

I'm a great fan of aptitude ... but I have stopped using it for installs on Kubuntu 11.10 because this kind of thing happened too often. I don't know what causes these situations - never experienced it on earlier versions - but it's not worth the hassle.

I use aptitude 'search' and 'show' functions only, and apt-get for installs.

[ronw]

This may not be your specific problem, slackcub, but there is a bug in aptitude's handling of multiarch.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...de/+bug/831768

The fix in comment 14 works, but that is also currently on the known issues list of upgrading from 11.10 to 12.04.

[slackcub]

I apologize for the delay in replying. ronw, I tried the fix in 14 and it seemed to work. I now have only 2 suggested removals (something about acroread and nspluginwrapper). But my question now is will this be pulling only i386 packages, or amd64? Are there any other limitations this could place on my system?

David

[ronw]

If you are running amd64, you should get amd64 packages. That's been my experience for a few months now since disabling multiarch.

After reading the release note that multiarch must be enabled to upgrade to 12.04, I enabled it again out of curiosity. No problems as a result, but I also haven't installed anything that requires the ia32-libs package. I've also resisted the urge, so far, to upgrade to 12.04 early.

[GreyGeek]

I run the 64bit Kubuntu Precise and don't have the ia32 libraries installed and have deliberately avoided installing them in favor of 64bit apps. There are, however, some packages that are STILL only available as 32 bit apps. GoogleEarth is one. Trying to install it gave me a message that it needed to install 234 additional packages, which included the ia32 libs. I declined, and opted to use the web browser version instead.

[slackcub]

Thanks for the info. We'll see if I upgrade to 12.04 or not. So far multiarch/aptitude is the only thing I'm having an issue with right now, and I'm pretty happy with everytyhing else. More than likely I'll just leave it disabled and continue on with my life! Thanks for the info.

David