Hi, Don! On Thu, Sep 04, 2008 at 02:24:20PM -0700, Don Stewart wrote:
acm:
Hi, Haskell!
I've downloaded the ghc-6.8.3-i386-unknown-linux.tar.bz2 tarball, which I expected to work on my GNU/Linux box (1.2 GHz Athlon, Debian Sarge).
Was there a problem installing GHC from the Debian package system with apt?
Yes, my apt setup is broken. Because of a (now fixed) configuration error I made, aptitude (a frontend to apt) has decided it needs to delete ~400 packages from my system, some of them vital. It's an "intelligent", "helpful" system, and maintaining consistency between packages is of utmost importance to it, more important, by far, than leaving my system in a working state. I haven't found a convenient, safe, way of resetting this "deletion cache" (which has been hanging around for ~1 year). Sadly its only "go button" is "do everything pending", so I've effectively blocked myself from using it. Sorting the mess out, or even discovering whether I could safely use apt directly, is just too much drudgery; I'll be installing a new system sometime soon anyway. I hate package managers almost as much as binary packages. There are quite a lot of things I don't hate, though. ;-) That's kind of drifting off topic, though.
-- Don
-- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).