"ext Mike Klein" <mklein at vxappliance.com> writes: > How is it that a package can be marked "Installable" and yet not install? A package has status "Installable" when there are no dependency issues upfront (i.e., no missing packages and no unresolvable conflicts). A package might still fail to install, tho: it might contain files that are also in some other package, or one of its maintainer scripts might fail (or you might run out of storage, etc). > With new firmware I cannot "cleanly" install unzip, wget...as these have > bizarre dependency issues. > > With wget I get dep failure of "wget-ssl" conflict...yet I have no wget > on N800 and from googling this appears to be a deprecated package. The Application Manager is not smart at all when reporting conflicts. It might be that the AM picks out wget-ssl as the culprit although it is not installed. This is probably technically correct, but not very helpful. In general, if you have bizzare dependency issues, debugging them with the AM is going to be hard. You pretty much have to dig into the issue using apt-cache, et al. (I have plans to get more serious about reporting conflicts in the AM.) The idea is of course that the repositories don't contain bizarre dependency issues. But with our bizarre repository landscape, bizarre dependencies are unfortunately to be expected. > I also tried installing a gstreamer plugins lib (said it was > installable) and it fails silently! Wtf?!? This is linux man. Error > msgs please. There are ZERO dep issues for this pkg and it just > fails. Error messages are in "Tools > Log". Again, the idea is that the maintainer of a package (together with the maintainers of related packages) makes sure that it installs properly before it hits Joe Sixpack. For Joe, "Unable to install foo" should just mean "Foo is broken, gaad dammit, let's try Bar." He is not supposed to be able to do anything about it. Likewise with missing dependencies: In the normal world, getting a package that has a missing depencies means that the distribution you are using is broken and there is not much more you should do than file a bug and wait. In the maemo world, people go on a package hunt to find the missing pieces somewhere in one of the million repositories. No wonder it gets messy. > I am in redpill mode as I needed root access for a variety of apps. (Red-pill mode has nothing to do with root access. It only controls what packages you see in the Application Manager.)
