apt-get - insane supercow

[Segfault]

Hi folks,

I found the famd goes berserk in my system and I removed it. Now I can't install nor upgrade anything, apt-get tells me there are unmet dependencies. How can I keep this fam out of my system and still be able to use apt-get?

[Harold]

There is no Debian package named famd. The is one called fam and one called libfam0. The fam package installs the famd executable, which is started either manually or by inetd. (Please tell me that inetd is not running on your computer.) Doing apt-get remove fam removes only the one package. Doing apt-get remove libfam0 will cause 10-15 gnome packages to be removed also. What exactly did you do to remove famd? Why was it running? Have you manually changed anything in /etc/init.d/ or /etc/rc2.d/? famd goes berserk?

Please post the output being generated by apt-get.

Details, 'kopf. The more, the better. :-)

[Segfault]

Well... I use an old 486 as a gateway/firewall for my home network, with a new HDD as only decent piece of h/w. It's running FreeBSD and I use NFS to share my files stored there.
Now, I use various progs from my Debian desktop to concurrently access those files (Audacity, Midnight Commander, Nautilus, xterm, etc.) This seems to be too much for poor old fam, because at some point it fills all the RAM and eats up all the CPU resources and makes my PC really slow. (I configured it NOT to monitor NFS volumes, dunno why it still feels offended.)
Since my box is not exposed directly to the Internet, I decided I do not need the damn thing and used dpkg to purge it. Now, whatever I want to do with the apt-get it complains about unmet dependencies (for Gnome) and refuses to yield to my commands (who is the Master here, me or...?) unless I reinstall that FAM.
Steps taken so far:
1) Swearing,
2) Started downloading latest Gentoo ISO,
3) Found a package called equivs and currently investigating what it can do for me.

[Segfault]

OK. Let me rephrase th question: Is there a known way to tell apt-get to ignore an unsatisfied dependency? I apparently can fool it with equivs, but I'm looking for more elegant way to do this. Like putting

crap_to_ignore="fam"

somewhere into config file.
I have been looking around and it seems the line I put to the subject of this thread is quite correct...?

[Harold]

dummkopf> Is there a known way to tell apt-get to ignore an unsatisfied dependency?

No. apt-get's sole reason for existing is to resolve unsatisfied dependencies.

Point your web browser to ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/deborphan/. Download deborphan_1.7.15_i386.deb. Get to a console prompt. cd into the directory containing the file you just downloaded. su to root. Do dpkg -i deborphan_1.7.15_i386.deb. Do deborphan -ad | grep fam > ~/fam.txt. Post the contents of ~/fam.txt to the forum.

[Segfault]

>No. apt-get's sole reason for existing is to resolve unsatisfied dependencies.

Good. Thanks for the answer.
BTW, the sole reason of a wall is to protect somebody behind the wall, but sometime a door would become handy ...

Here's the output of deborphan -ad | grep fam

Code: Select all

libfam0c102 (main/libs)
      fam
fam (main/admin)
      libfam0c102
      fam

Dear Harold, what you want to prove me here? That the distro (OS) is smarter than user? I guess the guys from Redmond own that concept
Thanks again, at least you answered my question.

[Harold]

dummkopf> Dear Harold, what you want to prove me here?

I'm trying to understand what fam and libfam are, what they do, why they are necessary. Deborphan just told us that there are no Debian packages on your computer which depend on fam or libfam0c102 (except each other). I have no experience with NFS and was wondering if fam/libfam was an NFS requirement, but that appears not to be the case. Oh well, Google is my friend...

[Segfault]

It calls itself File Alteration Monitor, so my first guess was it is part of an intrusion detection system.
apt-get tells me it is required for Gnome. I've used Gnome with FAM removed for a couple of weeks now and can't see anything unusual nor decreased functionality.

[Segfault]

FAM (File Alteration Monitor) is a daemon which can be used to get notification when a file or directory changes. It is developed by SGI and often used by applications such as file managers, e.g. nautilus uses it when available.

FAM is made out of two parts, famd the actual daemon application and a libfam which client applications can use to communicate with FAM.

famd can be run as an xinetd service or just always started a boot.

FAM solves a common problem encountered in writing applications which have to react when a file or directory changes (e.g. file managers,email arrival notification,etc.). The old method of doing this is by continuously polling the file/directory in a loop (usually with a little delay). As you would expect this is not an very efficient method, lots of applications could all be continuously polling files causing a lot of disk activity and sucking up CPU time. FAM solves this by having a common API (libfam) and a daemon. Applications can register which event (like a write,delete,create,execute) for a certain file/dir they want to be notified about. This means there will be only one polling loop and if multiple applications monitor the same file, there won't be a duplication of effort.

FAM also supports (instead of a polling loop) kernel based monitoring, which is an even more efficient method. For Linux this is called dnotify (standard in recent 2.4 and 2.6 kernels). A patch is needed for this at the moment, since the last official release doesn't include this support. But many distributions ship FAM with this patch already enabled by default.

So, it is part of Gnome (Nautilus). I still don't care, I use Nautilus very seldom and I can refresh the window manually if needed.