Re: setup installs packages without displaying it

[Brian Dessent <brian at dessent dot net>]

"Gerrit P. Haase" wrote:

> I have selected some packages checked in the partial view which packages
> are active, then when installation strted several packages were
> installed which were not selected.  E.g. autoconf, automake related and
> such.
> 
> Since I explicitely excluded these form upgrade because I use local
> patched versions, I'm somewhat shocked now.  It is really a mess.  My
> local versions got uninstalled.

Here is what happened.  You selected some package that needed autoconf. 
Setup saw that you didn't have autoconf installed, so it selected it
also.

But, because you were on the "partial" page you did not see that
autoconf was selected because setup does not update the "view filtering"
except when switching views.  If you had pressed the View button to
cycle to "Full" (or even just cycle through them all and back to
"Partial") you would have seen autoconf selected.

If you *really* want to do what you're trying to do, this is how you
should do it:

1. Select the desired package.
2. Deselect the automatically added dependencies, possibly switching the
view first to reveal them, as described above.
3. Press next.
4. Uncheck the "install these dependencies" and dismiss whatever stern
warnings come at you.

Yes, it's a pain.  But, you do have to realize that what you are trying
to do is so NOT what the typical setup user needs.  Typical setup users
want stuff to work and don't want to know about dependencies et cetera,
so the more that we can have setup take care of that automatically the
better.

On a fundamental level, the way you are trying to do this is wrong.  I
think if you did the same thing -- replace files "owned" by the package
manager -- with any other linux distro (e.g. apt or rpm), you would get
burned as well.

This is how I suggest you do it:

1. Uninstall the packaged version.
2. Build/Install local version into --prefix=/usr/local, never /usr.
3. Create a dummy package with version 99.999 or something so that setup
will always think that what you have installed is newer than anything
available.  I think this could be as simple as just editing
/etc/setup/installed.db to contain a line such as "autoconf
autoconf-99.999-1.tar.bz2 0", without actually creating a package.

Brian