Arch Linux

Youdaman

Member

From: Sydney, Australia

Registered: 2006-01-14

Posts: 41

avahi and howl

I came across an interesting conflict today -- if I install gobby and later install gnome I cannot install howl... but... howl WAS installed when I installed gobby, as gobby requires obby and obby requires howl. However when I installed gnome, it seems howl was replaced with avahi, which conflicts with howl, and thus I couldn't install howl again -- gobby complained howl was needed for a collaborative editing session!

So, I decided I didn't need gnome anyhow (I'll stick to blackbox) so I uninstalled gnome (pacman -Rcn gnome), then uninstalled gobby and re-installed it, and viola! howl is back!

Is this kind of caper common with Arch? I must admit it's much more fun than the usual "dependency hell" of RPMs or DEBs -- mostly because I was able to actually get everything working again with some un/re-installing of packages!

JGC

Developer

Registered: 2003-12-03

Posts: 1,664

Re: avahi and howl

avahi provides and conflicts with howl, so if you would install avahi first, then gobby won't look for howl anymore.

Youdaman

Member

From: Sydney, Australia

Registered: 2006-01-14

Posts: 41

Re: avahi and howl

Yep you're right, avahi and howl are interchangeable.

I uninstalled gobby and howl, and then installed avahi followed by gobby just to check the inter-changeable-ness of avahi and howl, and when I ran gobby the warnings in the console did indeed mention avahi and a howl compatibility layer.

When reverting back to my original howl/gobby setup, uninstalling avahi didn't work with pacman -Rs avahi. I had to use pacman -Rc avahi instead, because nss-mdns depended ON avahi, however nss-mdns was istalled as a dependency OF avahi. Is this a kind of co-dependency?

I'm new to Arch and I've found that these kinds of "inter-dependency puzzles" are handled really well by pacman -- it's awesome