On Fri, Jun 16, 2017 at 11:18:21AM +1000, Tom wrote:

>
> I did the upgrade to Ascii yesterday before I sent the email after reading
> about the dbus
> package updates, so yes the dist-upgrade works but ends up with the large
> number of
> packages set for removal. Apologies for not mentioning that previously.

Which are those packages set for removal? Are packages marked as
"unnecessary" because where automatically installed by previous
versions of other packages and are not required any more?

>
> tasksel doesn't appear to be a virtual package here. Is there any reason
> why tasksel
> in jessie has a higher version than tasksel in ascii? It will work if I
> purge and reinstall
> the tasksel package back to the lower version, but this shouldn't be
> required.
>

The reason is that the development of some of the devuan-forked
packages has not followed the usual unstable-testing-stable path,
otherwise we would have probably not had jessie ready before a few
more years :)

IMHO, you should be able to safely remove tasksel-xfce4 and none of
your xfce4 packages should be touched. As a matter of fact, you can
remove tasksel entirely from your system, and none of the other
packages that it would pull in will be affected. I have *never* had
tasksel installed since it has been introduced. TBH, I find it to be a
terribly complicated mess to not much avail, but that's just the
opinion of a caveman.

>
> On another note, since devuan doesn't yet have an interface similar to that
> of
> packages.debian.org, can I trust the output of "apt-cache policy" to tell
> me what's
> really in the master archive? I would like to ensure that I'm not getting
> incorrect package
> information for each release here from a misconfigured mirror somewhere.
>

If you have apt-get update-d, and you don't have any caching system in
the middle, apt-cache policy is the autoritative source of information
about which packages are available in the different sections of the
repos.

HTH

KatolaZ

-- 
[ ~.,_  Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ - GLUGCT -- Freaknet Medialab  ]  
[     "+.  katolaz [at] freaknet.org --- katolaz [at] yahoo.it  ]
[       @)   http://kalos.mine.nu ---  Devuan GNU + Linux User  ]
[     @@)  http://maths.qmul.ac.uk/~vnicosia --  GPG: 0B5F062F  ] 
[ (@@@)  Twitter: @KatolaZ - skype: katolaz -- github: KatolaZ  ]