Kdar & dependency hell in general

Discussion on backup

I like mondo, but it's more oriented to partitions or a whole disk

http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/forum/showthread.php?t=156&highlight=backup

Mike

Read this about Debian snapshot:
www.mepislovers-wiki.org/index.php?title=Source:Debian_snapshot

If you use the Debian sources from the time when you installed Mepis (or when you did a upgrade last time) there should be no "dependency hell".

Hope that helps.

--
Post questions on www.mepislovers.org too.
Check out our wiki: www.mepislovers-wiki.org

Mike, thanks for the link. I'll have to look around some more.

Adrian, thanks for your link, too. It would help if there were a Kdar deb package there, but there isn't. All I have are source and an older deb, both of which expect libraries that have changed. So, yes, I'm still in dependency hell.

The date snapshot is very interesting and useful otherwise, though.

To resolve this I may need to learn to use dar from the command line.

Yuk! So 20th century!

Andy

I just successfully compiled Kdar on SimplyMepis 3.4-3
The key was, indeed, the debian repository date snapshot.

First I downlaoded and unpacked Kdar 2.0.7 from
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=96947

I then added
http://snapshot.debian.net/archive/2006/01/20/debian/
etch
main contrib non-free
to the Synaptic Repostories list and disabled the regular debian repo.
I then installed kdebase-dev & libdar-dev
./configure then worked, but make failed on libattr
back to Synaptic for libattr1-dev
make - su - make install
Success!

Hey, I don't quite understand all this but I will give it a try!

Thanks for the info, I'll post my results.

Andy
(who has his fingers crossed)

Well, the point with Debian snapshot is that you can get any version of a package you want. Since kdar asks for kdebase-dev & libdar-dev then you can intall those from the snapshot.

Thanks timkb4cq for the how-to.

--
Post questions on www.mepislovers.org too.
Check out our wiki: www.mepislovers-wiki.org

Thanks timkb4cq! It worked!

I admit being a bit perplexed here. The error messages I originally received did not mention either kdebase-dev or libdar-dev by exactly those names. I did get a message about libdar, though. How did you know you needed libdar-dev and kdebase-dev?

Anyway, it worked, and I now know about the snapshot, so I'm a happy camper. Still, it's not exactly Point & Click Linux, is it?

Thanks again.

Andy

I've spent many hours in RPM dependency hell using Mandrake 8.1 -> 10.1 and as a result I've learned to decode the error messages from failed builds. That's one of the reasons I switched to Mepis - there are a lot more "point & click installable" apps in the Debian universe than in the RPM one and, in my experience, far less chance of hosing your whole install with incompatible libraries.

This is not to run down Mandrake/Mandriva. It's a great distro that works well when using the RPMs built for the version you're using. I just wanted to use a few apps that didn't have Mandrake RPMs available.

First rule of thumb - when ./configure fails because it can't find Headers for "Foo" they are usually found in a package named some variation of "Foo-dev". I know that the bulk of KDE is in the kdebase package, so when ./configure couldn't find KDE Headers the first place to look for them was in kdebase-dev.

I agree that it would be much easier if Kdar was in the Debian repositories. But the Debian project has to depend on the developers of most packages to make and submit their .deb files for the repos - just as Microsoft has to depend on third party developers to make (or license) a compatible install program. Apparently the Kdar developers haven't submitted Debian packages. Can't blame that on Mepis or on Debian. Perhaps a polite request to the Kdar developers would do the trick...

Actually there's not need to ask Kdar developers to do that, anybody interested and with some skills can became a package maintaner and provide that to Debian repos. (not sure what's the procedure exactly, I'm sure you can find it at debian.org)

--
Post questions on www.mepislovers.org too.
Check out our wiki: www.mepislovers-wiki.org

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind.

Andy