Ted Harding wrote: [...]
Now: Recently, on a Debian system which (from the time-stamps on the earliest user files) seems to have been Debian Etch (April 2009, though I have been following the updates), I installed the xfmail MUA which I have habitually used on a much older system. It was hnot available in the Etch repository, so I searched the web and found and used the deb package
xfmail_1.5.5-3_i386.deb 17-Jan-2006 22:35 951K
and it all seemed to go in; and also, it seems to work. So far so good.
Happy new year, everyone.
http://packages.debian.org/etch/xfmail suggests it should have been in the etch repository, but the link to development information (PTS) says that there was a 1.5.5-4 series and a 1.5.5.dfsg.1 series, but then http://bugs.debian.org/523914 says it was removed by request of the Quality Assurance team at version 1.5.5.dfsg.1-0.1 because it was out of date, orphaned (no-one was willing to maintain it), depended on a library which was to be removed and included a release-critical bug.
In short, installing that package unmodified will probably break the system and hinder upgrades.
The ideal solution would be to update the package. The last homepage is http://xfmail.slappy.net/ but that is even more out of date than the etch package. The last listed project maintainer I found was http://www.cfreeze.com/ but he doesn't mention xfmail on his site. It looks pretty unmaintained. Any hero in ALUG want to pick it up?
[...]
So it still stubs its toes on xfmail, but now without any indication that the installation of libimlib2 (and therefore of ffmpeg) is really interfered with by xfmail. It just seems to want to get xfmail out of the way before it does anything else.
I do not want to remove xfmail. So is there a way to persuade apt-get (or any other Debian installation program) to ignore xfmail and get on with what it has been asked to do?!!
Or am I misunderstanding the workings?
I'm pretty sure that imlib is part of the same general family of GTK related libraries as glib and that the upstream numbers on the end of the package names increased in step from 1 to 2, so it is probably not simple to have glib1.2 (required by xfmail) installed at the same time as imlib2, although I can't see the exact reason for that.
You could try installing the two missing xfmail dependencies, but the "not installable" warnings make me wonder whether there's some problem in /etc/apt/sources.list - are you sure it's etch? Check the /etc/debian_version file - I think etch was 4.0.*
Hope that helps,