apt-get -f upgrade

[Joseph Smidt]

Sometimes upgrading fails with synaptic and you have you go to the terminal and type apt-get -f upgrade. For people who aren't terminal literate this is a problem. It would be nice if synaptic could manage this.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

On Sat, Jan 07, 2006 at 04:56:42AM -0000, Joseph Smidt wrote:
> Public bug reported:
> https://launchpad.net/malone/bugs/6512
>
> Affects: synaptic (Ubuntu)
> Severity: Normal
> Priority: (none set)
> Status: New

Thanks for your bugreport.

> Description:
> Sometimes upgrading fails with synaptic and you have you go to the
> terminal and type apt-get -f upgrade. For people who aren't terminal
> literate this is a problem. It would be nice if synaptic could manage
> this.

Could you please explain in what situations you have to do this?

Usually it should be fine to click on "Edit/Fix broken packages" if
you have broken packages on your system. Sometimes when a packages
tries to override a package or if a postinst script fails it's often
enough to remove/upgrade the package in question (and that usually
happens during development only).

I'm happy to investigate what synaptic can do to fix this
automatically if I get a good example where it fails.

Thanks,
 Michael

--
Linux is not The Answer. Yes is the answer. Linux is The Question. - Neo

[neutrico (neutrico)]

You are right - synaptic can manage most problematical situations - but I think that synaptic should solve these problems automatically.

User interaction is in fact not needed - synaptic should fix broken packages automatically.

Unfortunately there are situations when postinst/preinst/etc. scripts are broken and then user has to fix them manually to remove or fix package but that's not synaptic problem. These problems should be reported to packages that are broken not to synaptic.

I think that you could send my comment as feature request to synaptic upstream and close this bug here.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

I make this a wishlist bug for now based on the suggestion of the last comment.

Thanks,
 michael