[KLUG Members] debian question

[Peter Buxton]

On Mon, Sep 10, 2001 at 06:52:47PM -0500, Patrick Stockton was only 
   escaped alone to tell thee:

> I decided that running stable debian was just a little too low key so I
> decided to go with unstable and life life on the edge :)

Good for you. :)

> Then ran an 'ap-get dist-upgrade' and it downloaded all the upgraded
> packages that it needed.

Hmmm, 'dist-upgrade' is for Pre-depends only, and dates from the 2.0 Linux
kernel and glibc 2.1(?), when things became very hairy with breaking
upgrades. If foo 1.2 depends on bar 3.4, you can install both together.
Predepends forces an order onto the procedure so your system doesn't break
itself upgrading in place.

'dselect-upgrade' is much easier, as you can run 'update' then check with
dselect that all your packages agree with each other. 'dselect-upgrade' will
use the Install/Hold/Remove/Purge options you set in dselect.

> Okey,Fetched 62.9MB in 28m24s (36.9kB/s) 

Hm, 63MB from stable to unstable; you don't have much on your system,
evidently. Fast pipe, though. :)

> 90% [Scanning packages]Template parse error near "" at
> /usr/lib/perl5/Debian/DebConf/Template.pm line 102, <TEMPLATES> chunk 2.
> E: Sub-process /usr/sbin/dpkg-preconfigure --apt returned an error code
> (29) E: Failure running script /usr/sbin/dpkg-preconfigure --apt

What package did it fail on? Or is this before any packages were installed?
Hmm... in unstable, dpkg can itself break. Try upgrading individual packages
first, 'apt-get install perl' or 'dpkg'. All those packages you d/l'ed are
in /var/cache/apt/archives. dpkg-preconfigure is a part of debconf:

> > debconf: cannot preconfigure packages -- apt-utils is not installed.
> > 
> > Perhaps you should either depend on apt-utils or extract what you need
> > from it into another package (or put it into the main apt) and depend on
> > that?
> 
> This is not a bug.  Preconfiguration of packages is an optional feature,
> and debconf already Recommends: apt-utils.
 
Try upgrading file-utils, apt-utils, debconf, then running the whole
upgrade.