weird apt-get problem....

[Need4Speed]

well i upgraded all my boxes to 3.1 over the last couple days. On the laptop I decided to do a fresh netinstall. Basically installed the default desktop env. Now I want to remove mozilla-browser and epihany, but for some strange reason apt wants to remove all of gnome and gnome-desktop with it...any thoughts on this?

 

[sciencewhiz]

remember that gnome and gnome-desktop are metapackages that depend on mozilla or epiphany and a whole bunch of other packages. If you remove any of the dependencies, you remove the metapackage, but not the rest of the dependencies which are really what makes up gnome.

 

[Need4Speed]

ok..so its ok to let it do that? I'm not much when it comes to using the GUI as all of my deb boxes are CLI, so i am not familiar with these packages.

 

[Chaotic42]

If you want to force it to get rid of Mozilla, use dpkg.

dpkg --force-depends --remove mozilla-browser

I'm not sure what the package name is, but that format should work for you. Be careful when using this, though. There may be a reason for those dependancies, and you might break something.

 

[sciencewhiz]

Originally posted by: Need4Speed
ok..so its ok to let it do that? I'm not much when it comes to using the GUI as all of my deb boxes are CLI, so i am not familiar with these packages.

That's correct, it's ok.

 

[Nothinman]

f you want to force it to get rid of Mozilla, use dpkg.

dpkg --force-depends --remove mozilla-browser

Never do that. Trying to get around the package manager's constraints will only bring you pain.

If gnome and gnome-desktop are all that it wants to remove, go for it, they don't do anything but depend on the rest of gnome to make it easy to say 'apt-get install gnome'.

 

[Need4Speed]

great! thanks guys. I was not aware that these were meta-packages.