[SGVLUG] Upgrade problems with Debian apt-get

[David Lawyer]

I've been upgrading my Debian testing "distribution" about once a
year.  A couple of years ago I would start it in the evening and by
the morning it would be all downloaded.  But now, since I've added a
lot of stuff like zope and gnome, it takes a night-day-night to
download (about 36 hours) on my 28.8k modem.  Even 56k wouldn't help
much as I understand they don't really do 56k.

Anyway, just doing an ordinary upgrade resulted in perhaps 100
packages being held back for unknown reasons (may have needed
additional packages).  So by doing a so called "dist-upgrade" it did
better.  I also tried various flags to get it to fetch everything.
I found one package missing from their server but got the same package
from "unstable" and it works and reported the bug to Debian.

But the major problem I'm having now is that netkit-inetd will not
configure.  As a result, I can't configure a number of other packages
that I need.  But the unconfigured stuff seems to still work.  The
updated software is what I'm using right now, but with the old
configuration files, etc.  The "unconfigured" packages include the
mail agent exim which will send out this email, and ppp which connects
me to the internet over the phone line so I can send out this email.
I've reported this as a bug to Debian but I found an outstanding bug
report of the same problem that is over a year old.  Not too
encouraging about getting a fast fix!

Do I have to debug the Debian configuration scripts to get it working?
They are kind of complex since one shell function has a line that
calls another shell function in another file, etc., etc.  And I have
no idea what the parameters to these functions do (no comments in the
code).  I think there"s a script debugger program but I don't know
what script to call since if I called the script where the error
happens (I've been above to find it) it will not run, since it would
have undefined shell variables and functions that are defined in
parent scripts.  And I have no intention of learning the code of the
Debian configuration system.

			David Lawyer