[Gllug] Is there any danger that Evolution will go away again (Debian)

[adam at thebowery.co.uk]

On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 10:12:15AM -0000, john at sinodun.org.uk wrote:
> For quite some time, Evolution was missing from the Debian testing (Sarge)
> not-release.  It's now reappeared and I'm a happy bunny again, but...
> Is there any danger of it disappearing again?  Could I one day type
> "apt-get update; apt-get upgrade" and find that 2 minutes later I'm
> Evolution-less again?  What happens if a package is kicked out of the
> Debian distribution due to failed builds (or failed builds of a dependency
> as in this case)?

You should perhaps try apt-get -s upgrade to simulate the upgrade before
actually doing it, it has been known that the debian package listing gets
broken at times and can end up in a hopelessly broken state. (although, I
havn't seen that happen for a few years now)

If you see that evolution (or whichever package you need) is going to be 
removed you should put the package on "hold" you can do this through dselect 
or through using dpkg --get-selections and dpkg --set-selections. (if you use
aptitude then you should be aware that it doesn't globally "hold" the package,
ie if you use aptitude and then use apt-get it will ignore the selections that
aptitude has made) 

For example

dylan:~# dpkg --get-selections | grep evolution
evolution                                       install

you could then issue a command like 

dylan:~# echo "evolution hold" | dpkg --set-selections

and then to see that the package is being held

dylan:~# dpkg --get-selections | grep evolution
evolution                                       hold

and to change the status back you would

dylan:~# echo "evolution install" | dpkg --set-selections

Adam
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