Notices

i have a script/command file that does

apt-get install this that the-other...

i had gone through and added all the repos on gronmayer, and picked through the app managers list of available apps and decided on which ones i wanted to install. the apps i chose are in the command file.

i ran the command file, answered a few yes/no questions, and it was off downloading and installing my apps. when all was done, i launched the app manager, and took a look at things to see what was what.

most, if not all, of the apps that were just installled had broken dependencies. i have tried to look for a way to have apt-get do the dependency resolution, but have found little more than nothing.

wikipedia states that apt relies on repos to do the dependency resolution. there was also a reference to dpkg using a force option, but i dont know if this is what i am after.

what i would like to accomplish is installing a slew of apps via apt-get and using other functionality of apt-get or dpkg (or anything else necessary) to resolve dependencies during an automated install.

the app manager gui is dreadfully slow and hinders my tablet-ing time when a rebuild of the device is needed or the firmware is to be updated. any ideas?

actually, apt-get does the dependency resolution. The GUI App Manager is very dumbed down and has lots of restrictions on what it allows and what it doesn't allow which might hinder dependency resolution.

When using apt-get from the command-line to install a package, either all dependencies can be resolved or apt-get will abort before doing anything. If somehow you have partially installed packages,

apt-get -f install

is the easiest way to get everything back to together. If that doesn't work, it should give you enough information to know which packages cannot be installed. This is either the result of a broken package (it depends on something that doesn't exist (any more)), or you don't have the necessary repositories enabled (sometimes a package from repos a relies on a package from repo b). The last thing is something that's fairly unique to Maemo and a result of the lack of leadership on the part of Nokia. There aren't really any official "developer" repos that people can upload their packages to. Instead, there are tons of "private" repos of different sizes, that have cross dependencies that break if a package gets updated (and then the packages depending on it don't work any more).

If you need to remove a package, you can try

apt-get remove [--purge] <packagename>

(--purge is optional and will also remove most of the global configuration files for that package). If other packages depend on the given package, apt-get will remove those, too (it should ask for confirmation, in that case).

However, apt-get can get a bit stuck if there are bad unresolved dependencies (basically, if after execution of the apt-get command there are still unresolved dependencies, apt-get won't run). In that case, you have to fall back to "dpkg":

dpkg --remove <packagename>
(replace --remove with --purge in order to remove config files, as above)

dpkg only cares about dependencies for that particular package, not the whole SET of installed packages (apt-get does that). Hence, it can get you out of protracted situations. However, it won't uninstall packages that depend on the given package - it will just refuse to remove the given package. In that case, also uninstall the package that depends on the given package:

dpkg --remove <packagename> <package-depending-on-packagename> etc...

This should get you out of most situations.

Martin

PS: it's a sad fact that the built-in application manager is slow and has a mind of it's own on what you "should" and "shouldn't" do....

the thing is that all the packages i wanted to install via CLI/script/apt-get were available and installable via the GUI. no repo work was done in the interim. ultimately, they were installed via the GUI, as my little script failed.

sorry to beat on this one a bit longer, but apt-get did do the installs, seemingly with dependency resolution, and no "failed to install package" messages came up, as far as i can remember. given that, which can be easily verified with another flash/rebuild, why would the GUI app manager show broken dependencies? in the case that this is true, can the GUI app manager correct the dependency issues? can apt-get correct the issues that the GUI is seeing? am i barking up a tree i will never climb?

Application Manager is probably lying to you and/or wanted to handle the situation differently than apt-get. BTW, don't add all the repositories on gronmayer.com. Many in the chinook section are actually either duplicates or repositories that are actually for bora that some genius decided should be in the chinook section as well. Also, there's no vetting process for repos listed there. Just use the app search on gronmayer and install repos as you need to. The fewer repos you use, the less chance of conflicting dependencies.

A bit harsh, considering that, for a while, Chinook Extras did not have a large number of required dependencies when OS2008 came out. Besides, 90% of the Bora/Mistral stuff that's on the OS2008 page works just fine (being console applications, libraries and whatnot).

I haven't seen any problems arise from the Bora/Mistral stuff in there, anyway. Much more likely to cause problems are the rtcomm beta repo and the SDK repo combined with an apt-get upgrade.

the only issues i ran into were repos being offline. i wound up disabling a couple that seems to have trouble, and was away without any further issues. the benefit of the smart installers is that they are supposed to install the newest versions possible, based on dependency fulfillment.

Smart package manager will work for .deb packages, and i can attest to the better functionality it has over yum specifically. not only does it do package conflict resolution, but the download of the packages are threaded, not serial. i run fedora 8 at home, and disable the yum-updatesd service and almost never use yum.

whats the likelyhood of getting a port of this for maemo? i think it would be a whole lot easier to work with and much better at installing a slew of apps in one pass.

I would like to have a port of aptitude. But with zilch programming skills, I get an error on compiling and no idea what to do next.

To Brendan and qwerty12:

What features of a "smart" package manager do you need that's not already in apt-get or synaptic? .deb's are far superior than .rpm and yes, YUM is a slow POS. Apt-get works much better. As for aptitude... I have yet to see any reason to use aptitude over apt-get. If anything, it's fussier over dependency resolution than apt-get.

Martin

There are only two features I miss in the application manager:

1) (not critically important) - an option (enable/disable) to ignore any currently off-line or failing repositories and just go ahead and update the package list anyway (like apt-get does). No more checking the logfile and disabling of repositories (which you then have to remember to re-enable at some point).

2) (important) - a third selection to show the _new_ packages since the last update (in addition to the existing two for upgrading and looking through everything). Now I update, then I check for upgrades, and then I have to wade through the whole list and try to spot something new. The command-line desktop application 'wajig' has such an option ('wajig new' in addition to 'wajig new-upgrades') - extremely useful, and more so when the list of applications grow.

So after searching about the forums for broken package dependencies, I figured I'd post in hopes that someone can help. In order to use PAN (news). I had installed a package called hildon-libs0 which then apparently depends on libossomime0 - For awhile that was fine as I got the end result of being able to use PAN. Now since I want to upgrade the ever impressive vagalume client, app manager or apt-get warns that I have a conflicting package in libossomim0 (<1.8.5). I've tried to remove the libossomime0 package via apt-get to no avail as apt tells me that it's not installed. I've installed the newer pan that doesn't have the weird package dependencies as suggested here http://www.geocities.com/SiliconVall...an_OS2008.html

and am stuck as I can't remove something that isn't installed. I'd really rather not flash to remove but will if forced to. Is there something else that I can do to remove the offending package so that I'm not stopped from upgrading? This problem affects some other apps that I have tried to install as they all complain about this libossomime problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated and as a side quest if no one can help me with that, why oh why does app manager have scroll everything to one side when I can't possible move the bar to view the whole name of the installable program? Thanks..