Re: [solved] Re: How to uninstall Emacs?

[Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se>]

Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com> writes:

> But the problem is that people don't actually do
> that very often. They don't learn first with
> a victim system and then work through the problems.
> Instead people run their critical production servers
> that way. They run their main desktops that way.
> And then when they have problems they complain that
> the OS is terrible, it crashed their desktop, they
> can't read their email, help!, and they sling enough
> mud at it. They can't wait to move off that terrible
> horrible distribution and move to the next one which
> is a thousand times better. Really! I see this all
> of the time!

OK, perhaps Sid shouldn't be used by Debian beginners
but you don't need to be a wizard to use it. If you
are an aspiring wizard perhaps using it will take you
closer to wizardry, at least if you have a parallel
system so you can still do stuff and don't have to
spend too much time fixing Sid.

> Many of the problems are related to package
> dependencies. Perhaps most of them. A Sid user needs
> to be skilled in identifying package dependencies,
> will need to hold packages, will need to manually
> install older versions of packages to avoid bugs

Indeed, you get to do such stuff.

I did this once - it was the image viewer gliv, which
I wanted because it can do slideshows, but the latest
version (in Debian Sid) had a bug and terminated on
startup. Once "down"graded it worked fine.

Temporarily change /etc/apt/sources.list and then

    sudo aptitude install PACKAGE=VERSION

after finding out the sought-after version's number.

But I don't remember many such problems from my Sid
days. What might explain it is on the whole I don't
use aptitude that much, because I already have zsh and
Emacs :) But I definitely did install new
programs habitually.

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573