dselect conflicts unresolved dependency

[oblomov]

Hi,

I'm having one small problem with Serverbeach Debian installation: by using dselect to install spamassassin it says there is an unresolved dependency because it seems spamassassin needs libc >= 2.3.2-1 that is not available for a stable (and I want to stay "stable"...).

The same thing does not happens by installing through apt-get (!), spamassassin just installs fine. When I go back to dselect though and try to install anything else the unresolved dependency prevents me to go further...

any idea?

[QT]

The only idea I have is to stop using dselect...it's evil (as you've noticed). Apt-get works just fine alone. :)

[ferret]

apt-get is a front-end for dselect. Dselect requires you to manually install the dependancies, while apt-get will automatically go out and get everything you need, and double check them if you desire.

Apt-get is easier and quicker, though searching the list of packages with "apt-cache search" can be a pain without 'less' or outputting it to a file and reading the list with pico/nano.

[oblomov]

I don't think apt-get is a front end to dselect, in fact both, apt-get and dselect, are front-end to APT (the debian packaging/update system). I'm not sure but I think apt-get is deprecated in favour of dselect (or aptitude or...) in the lasts debian docs.

Stopping using dselect is what I've already done but acutally I'd like to understand what's wrong with dselect ;-)

Thanks anyway

[knightfoo]

I would consider dselect to be deprecated. I've been using Debian for 5+ years now and there isn't anything I haven't been able to do or find with apt-get/apt-cache. dselect has a very awkward and non-intuitive interface .. the only thing it's good for is easily updating your available package lists if you wipe them out for some reason.

-knightfoo

[ferret]

Ahh. APT is the real thing, my bad. apt-get is a backend. To quote 'man apt-get'

apt-get is the command-line tool for handling packages, and may be considered the user's "back-end" to other tools using the APT library. Several "front-end" interfaces exist, such as dselect(8), aptitude, synaptic, gnome-apt and wajig.