407. Building less (458) as a temporary solution on Debian Jessie

Currently less conflicts with man-db/yelp/gnome-core/gnome on debian jessie. There are probably ways of overriding the conflict, but I prefer to simply compile my own less and install it.

Note that this doesn't take into account WHY less and man-db are listed as conflicting for versions of less below 4.5.6. I simply want less and the way to do it is to compile an approved version of less.

sudo apt-get install build-essential checkinstall
wget http://www.greenwoodsoftware.com/less/less-458.tar.gz
tar xvf less-458.tar.gz
cd less-458/
./configure
make
sudo checkinstall

0 -  Maintainer: [ root@niobium ]
1 -  Summary: [ less 4.5.8 ]
2 -  Name:    [ less ]
3 -  Version: [ 458 ]
4 -  Release: [ 1 ]
5 -  License: [ GPL ]
6 -  Group:   [ checkinstall ]
7 -  Architecture: [ amd64 ]
8 -  Source location: [ less-458 ]
9 -  Alternate source location: [  ]
10 - Requires: [  ]
11 - Provides: [ less ]
12 - Conflicts: [  ]
13 - Replaces: [  ]

406. Briefly: Missing package in debian wheezy -- forgot apt-pinning settings

In the off-chance that someone for some reason has made the same mistake as I have...

Wheezy is now stable and while that's all fine and dandy, when trying to install tor I kept on getting errors along the lines of

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Package tor is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

aptitude show tor

gave

No current or candidate version found for tor
Package: tor
State: not installed
Version: 0.2.3.25-1
Priority: optional

and

apt-cache policy tor

tor:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: (none)
  Version table:
     0.2.3.25-1 0
        -10 http://ftp.iinet.net.au/debian/debian/ wheezy/main amd64 Packages

I got similar errors for e.g. wine and virtualbox.
The solution is in the output of apt-cache -- I set up apt-pinning a long time ago (for mpich2?) and forgot about it.

cat /etc/apt/preferences

Package: *
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: 990

Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: -10

Package: *
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: -10

Well, wheezy is now stable (and I am tracking wheezy only in my sources.list now) so the problem was quickly solved by simply deleting /etc/apt/preferences.

405. First breakage in Debian Jessie? less vs man-db

Update 12/5/13: less 456 is in the debian repos now so the breakage is resolved:
http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=less

For some reason less (<456) and man-db conflict. man-db in turn is a requirement for yelp, which is a requirement for gnome-core which is a requirement for gnome. In other words, you currently have a choice between less or gnome.

More here: http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists.debian.org/msg1117622.html

verahill@debianstd:~/tmp/poppler_build$ sudo apt-get install less

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  gnome gnome-core gnome-user-guide man-db yelp
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  less
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 5 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
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