Re: [SLUG] Apt upgrades (was: sources.list messed up?)

From: Paul M Foster (paulf@quillandmouse.com)
Date: Wed Mar 05 2008 - 23:06:38 EST


On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 08:13:45PM -0500, Eben King wrote:

> On Wed, 5 Mar 2008, Paul M Foster wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 05:16:45PM -0500, Eben King wrote:
>>
>>> E: Dynamic MMap ran out of room
>>> E: Error occurred while processing kpresenter (NewVersion1)
>>> E: Problem with MergeList
>>>
> /var/lib/apt/lists/kubuntu.org_packages_koffice-latest_dists_edgy_main_binary-i386_Packages
>>> E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.
>>
>> Apt has its own cache settings. Go to /etc/apt/apt.conf. Insert the
>> following line into it:
>>
>> APT::Cache-Limit "25165824"
>>
>> This is a known issue with apt and its brethren.
>
> NoStop from alt.os.linux.ubuntu pointed me at
> http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/dynamic-mmap-ran-out-of-room-error-when-adding-new-apt-source-list-233417/
> which had pretty much the same fix you supplied (only it specifies 8M
> instead of 24M) I had 8M already, so I doubled it to 16M and it worked.
>

Yeah, I use 24M because I track Debian stable, testing and unstable. The
more repositories you track the higher your cache needs to be, and I've
run into this exact thing before.

> Pop that task off the mental stack, and I'm trying to upgrade xscreensaver.
> Aptitude says:
>
> i xscreensaver 4.21-4ubun
> 4.24-4ubun
> i xscreensaver-data 4.21-4ubun
> 4.24-4ubun
> i xscreensaver-gl 4.21-4ubun
> 4.24-4ubun
>
> That isn't much of an upgrade it's offering. The changefile at
> http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/changelog.html is up to 5.05. Is Ubuntu
> really that far behind, or is my apt still messed up?
>

It's absolutely possible that Ubuntu is that far behind. If you update
your apt (via apt-get update or otherwise) then you're as far as the
repository goes. It used to be that the *ubuntu respositories were based
on Debian's repositories, but I don't know how true that is any more.
Also, I don't know if Ubuntu originally tracked Debian stable, testing
or unstable. For example, my Debian-native apt repositories show
xscreensaver at version 5.04-2 (the version I have installed is 4.21-3).
But that 5.04-2 resides in Debian unstable.

Also, it's worth considering that xscreensaver probably went from 4.2x
to 5.0x in one jump or relatively few intervening versions. If so, then
the actual distance between 4.21 and 5.05 isn't really as far as it
looks.

On top of which, the packager for a given package on a given distro has
to do the packaging of each new version, submit it for testing, and only
then does it appear in the working repositories. Takes time.

Paul

-- 
Paul M. Foster
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