every once in a while i do something dumb. i do run debian testing and bits of unstable (as few as i can possibly get by with at present it is the kernel and firefox i use the most recent versions that land).
the case in point the other day was when i was trying to see if missing i386 includes could be fixed by randomly installing some i386 packages. i wasn't paying attention to the entire list of packages (not scrolling through the entire series of screens) and didn't notice that one package i installed removed pretty much my entire MATE desktop environment along with all sorts of other things important things. it wasn't until i came back a few minutes later and looked at the screen and said, "This isn't right!" to recover i went to /var/log/apt and copied the most recent term.log file to my root home directory and then edited it to remove some of the extra things i didn't need. and turned the Removes into apt-get installs, etc. after that i restarted the system to make sure it would boot and looked about right. the only things that i needed to figure out after that was that i had man pages that would not display correctly for a user vs. the root version which worked as it should and slrn also did not show the groups correctly (they both ran, but parts of the page were not rendered (the CAPS, and any options didn't show things like -v were gone from the text on the screen). so as usual i tried to find what parts made up those and reinstalled them. no luck. i also booted back into my stable partition and ran a list of all my installed packages so i could compare that list to what i had in the testing system. eventually i came up with the idea that the build-deps for slrn might contain some magical part that wasn't actually listed as a dependency for slrn itself. bingo! so all is right again (as far as i can tell :) ). note, this is how i learn and this isn't a production system that affects anyone else. i consider it my duty to have a bit of fun once in a while and try something out, but i don't recommend this for just anyone. as a side note, the issue i was trying to fix was my own error in having -m32 in CFLAGS in the shell environment when trying to build a python package that had some C extensions and that flag made the build process go out and look for i386 includes. so all of this was kicked off by me not remembering i had that flag set. i don't normally do much i386 type building so all of the things i added and the extra repositories that i put in exploring multi-arch probably can be removed now, but they don't seem to be taking up that much extra space. hmm... for the moment i'm leaving things alone. :) songbird
