synaptic broke my box; I think! :-}

[Panu Matilainen]

On Sat, 20 Mar 2004, John Thompson wrote:

> On Sat, 20 Mar 2004 18:47:39 +0200
> Chadley Wilson <chadley at pinteq.co.za> wrote:
> 
> > I really dont understand this one,
> > I did a distrobution upgrade mmmm!
> > 
> > I rebooted and gnome and kde have been uninstalled.
> > I don't know what else, So I have reloaded from the cds.
> > 
> > Has anyone else experienced this?
> 
> My experience with synaptic (not extensive, admittedly) is that it
> resolves rpm dependency problems by removing the packages it doesn't
> like.  If you have custom built packages that don't exactly match what
> is in the distribution database, then bye-bye custom packages.  I never
> found any way to configure this behavior, like the rpm "--nodeps"
> switch.

Synaptic used a slightly different algorithm for "fix broken dependencies" 
than apt up to 0.47 (for unknown historical reasons basically). Beginning 
with 0.48 it should behave much nicer.

> 
> > Is there a way to prevent it happening again?
> 
> Other than "don't use synaptic?" I never found one.  IMHO, Red Carpet is
> much nicer in this way.

The fix is to keep your rpm database consistent - never use --nodeps or 
--force to install/upgrade/erase with rpm.

	- Panu -