[Sussex] Debian is a pain in the bum

[Steve Dobson]

Geoff

On 29 May 2003 at 14:43 Geoff Teale wrote:
> I'm trying to put a chrooted Debian environment in a decent 
> (i.e. stable) state.  At some point this has probably been 
> pulling from unstable.  Anyhow, the following is a sticking point:
> 
> dubya:/# apt-get upgrade
> Reading Package Lists...
> Building Dependency Tree...
> You might want to run `apt-get -f install' to correct these.
> Sorry, but the following packages have unmet dependencies:
>   python2.1-gdbm: Depends: python2.1 (= 2.1.3-3.2) but 
> 2.1.3-3 is installed
>   python2.1-mpz: Depends: python2.1 (= 2.1.3-3.2) but 2.1.3-3 
> is installed
>   python2.1-tk: Depends: python2.1 (= 2.1.3-3.2) but 2.1.3-3 
> is installed
>   python2.1-xmlbase: Depends: python2.1 (= 2.1.3-3.2) but 
> 2.1.3-3 is installed
> E: Unmet dependencies. Try using -f.
> 

What is /etc/apt/sources.list pointing at?  Make sure it has 
been reset to stable (with the security updates[1]) and then 
apt-get update.

Before you go any it might be worth getting the stable version
of python2.1[2] by hand and installing it[3] before doing the
apt-get upgrade.

Steve

[1]
deb ftp://security.debian.org/debian-security stable updates
deb ftp://security.debian.org/debian-non-US stable non-US

[2]
http://packages.debian.org/stable/interpreters/python2.1.html

[3]
dpkg -i --force-<something> python2.1 2.1.3-3.2.deb

Sorry can't remember all the flags for dpkg - almost never
use it these days - only when backing out testing broken 
packages. dpkg will get you out of these sort of things but
it is a bit more work.