[plug] apt-get segfaulting

[Greg Mildenhall]

On Sun, 11 Apr 1999, Peter Caffin wrote:
> As much as I find the Debian Homepage useful (up to date files, etc) and
> the Debian distribution great (I can't see myself wanting/needing to go
> back), the search page on that site sucks blowfish. To find packages, etc,
> I always find myself back at Altavista typing in things like `+debian
> +depends +packagename` to find things (which works).

Then you are probably not using the search page correctly.
Make sure you select "Descriptions", and if you can't find what you want, 
select "all versions" and "all". The latest versions of apt-get, for
instance, will be in unstable. Then click on the appropriate package and
you will be presented with clear, useful dependencies.

The only time when the search page is not good enough is when you only
know the name of the package containing a file which is not significant to
be in the title or the description of the package. For that, you should
use "dpkg -S filename" to find which package supplied that file.
If you want to find which package a file is in when you've not installed
the package, then you should find the Content* files on the ftp site (does
anyone know why they're not on the CD anymore, or where on the CD they've
moved them to?) and grep (or zgrep) through them for the filename you
want.

Probably there are other dificulties with Debian package-management that I
haven't addressed, can anyone tell me what other problems they have?

-Greg Mildenhall