I seem to have messed up aptitude. Can't get back original behavior.
 

Hello,

I mistyped a command. I intended to type "dpkg -S gdb" to find what package
contains the debugger in question and instead I typed "aptitude -S gdb"
>From then on, aptitude starts but claims I only have 44 packages installed,
and a few more in the other categories. Is this a matter of just the display
or is it that now aptitude only knows about a very small subset of packages?

How do I return aptitude to the original behavior?

Of course I immediately checked man aptitude to see what I had done:

-S <fname>
Loads the extended state information from <fname> instead of the
standard state file.

Since I presume file "gdb" (in the context of aptitude) doesn't exist I'm
not quite sure what happened here. Help!

>From the manual page I gather that the default package state file is
/var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates, so I ran

aptitude -S /var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates

but this made no difference in returning aptitude to the previous behavior.

I had searched (inside aptitude) for gdb, but all I got were a few matches
of some libs that contain "gdb" in their names. Thus the attempt to search
with the mistaken command. Now I'm not sure if I can't find the gdb
program because aptitude is damaged somehow or because it is not in the
lenny distribution. I have used "dpkg -S /usr/bin/gdb" and
"dpkg -S /bin/gdb" so it appears that whatever package contains gdb is
not installed, searches for "gdb" and "-dev" inside aptitude didn't turn
out anything obvious.

Why did I go looking for gdb? Kaffeine crashed, and when told to give
me a backtrace, complained that gdb wasn't found.

# apt-cache search gdb
courier-authlib-userdb - userdb support for the Courier authentication library
libgdbm3 - GNU dbm database routines (runtime version)
python-dbg - Debug Build of the Python Interpreter (version 2.5)
ruby1.8 - Interpreter of object-oriented scripting language Ruby 1.8
vim-dbg - Vi IMproved - enhanced vi editor (debugging symbols)

This too failed to find gdb. Where is it? Do I have a totally damaged
package database now?

This is a freshly installed Lenny (not an upgrade). What has happened?

Any hints will be welcome. Thanks.

A.


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I seem to have messed up aptitude. Can't get back original behavior.
 

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 04:33:53PM -0500, "A. F. Cano" <afc@shibaya.lonestar.org> was heard to say:
> I mistyped a command. I intended to type "dpkg -S gdb" to find what package
> contains the debugger in question and instead I typed "aptitude -S gdb"
> >From then on, aptitude starts but claims I only have 44 packages installed,
> and a few more in the other categories. Is this a matter of just the display
> or is it that now aptitude only knows about a very small subset of packages?

Running "aptitude -S" won't do this (and I tested it just to be
sure). Breaking the package cache in some other way could.

> # apt-cache search gdb
> courier-authlib-userdb - userdb support for the Courier authentication library
> libgdbm3 - GNU dbm database routines (runtime version)
> python-dbg - Debug Build of the Python Interpreter (version 2.5)
> ruby1.8 - Interpreter of object-oriented scripting language Ruby 1.8
> vim-dbg - Vi IMproved - enhanced vi editor (debugging symbols)
>
> This too failed to find gdb. Where is it? Do I have a totally damaged
> package database now?

That confirms for sure that the problem is at a level below aptitude:
nothing aptitude-specific modifies the apt or dpkg package states. gdb
should be in the gdb package:

daniel@emurlahn:~$ apt-cache show gdb
Package: gdb
Priority: optional
Section: devel
Installed-Size: 5960
Maintainer: Daniel Jacobowitz <dan@debian.org>
Architecture: i386
Version: 6.8-3
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.7-1), libexpat1 (>= 1.95.8), libncurses5 (>= 5.6+20071006-3), libreadline5 (>= 5.2)
Suggests: gdb-doc
Filename: pool/main/g/gdb/gdb_6.8-3_i386.deb
Size: 2771050
MD5sum: 40866d448f22d8de8b5c657115df2a36
SHA1: 7158929355bb8a07c24154a19e59d6941a139137
SHA256: ecdcfc1616abd20341cb3bc7aeace65ada1fd01a6eaf545f98 ccd338caf71361
Description: The GNU Debugger
GDB is a source-level debugger, capable of breaking programs at
any specific line, displaying variable values, and determining
where errors occurred. Currently, it works for C, C++, Fortran,
Modula 2 and Java programs. A must-have for any serious
programmer.
Tag: devel::{debugger,lang:c,lang:c++,lang:fortran,lang :java}, interface::text-mode, role::program, scope::utility, suite::gnu, uitoolkit::ncurses, works-with::software:running

It could just be that the downloaded copy of the apt lists got deleted
somehow. Does running "aptitude update" or "apt-get update" help at all?

Daniel


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I seem to have messed up aptitude. Can't get back original behavior.
 

On Thu January 22 2009 01:33:53 pm A. F. Cano wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I mistyped a command. I intended to type "dpkg -S gdb" to find what
> package contains the debugger in question and instead I typed "aptitude -S
> gdb"
>
> >From then on, aptitude starts but claims I only have 44 packages
> > installed,

I've noticed this too a couple times today. I don't know what caused it but
updating the list of packages seems clear it up though.

In my case anyway.


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I seem to have messed up aptitude. Can't get back original behavior.
 

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 06:16:09PM -0800, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> ...
> It could just be that the downloaded copy of the apt lists got deleted
> somehow. Does running "aptitude update" or "apt-get update" help at all?

Yes. Even before seeing this message, I did an update and the problem
seems to have fixed itself. Thanks for replying.

A.


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