Hi -

I am very interested in the Debian astro"pure blend" and so tried installing some of the components (metapackages beginning"astro-") of it to my newish antiX-17 system, but neither installation with Synaptic nor apt-get install actually installed anything except for the very-few-kb metapackages ... I thought metapackages were supposed to"pull" all their component packages in and install them ...?

Perhaps the"astro-" metapackages need to be installed / added to the 'install metapackages' CC app somehow? Are Debian metapackages simply dealt with differently in antiX (thus the separate CC app)?

Thanks,

Glenn

no, metapackages are not handled any differently. the app in control center allows for more customization and"recipes" of packages to install, which can also be meta-packages.

can you give me an example package name that you installed?


***edit*** actually, there is a big difference in the way depends are handled between antiX and debian proper. The main issue is that in mainline debian,"recommends" are installed by default, and in antiX (and mx, and most other debian distros), recommends are not installed by default.

most meta-packages (like libreoffice) list the grouped apps as"depends" rather than"recommends". But the astro- packages list all the grouped apps as"recommended" rather then"depend".

So when you installed them from synaptic, the actually packages you wanted were not pulled it, just the actual meta-package itself.

So what you want to do is to to into your synaptic preferences and select the option for installing"recommended as depends" or something like that. ( I'm at work and I don't have synaptic available to me at the moment so I can't give you the exact wording.) then reinstall your meta-packages, and the apps you want should be pulled in.

Its up to your whether you disable installing recommends automatically or not after you have the packages you want.

Thanks. Very clear explanation.

Glenn

It might be the case that the meta packages from Debian also want to install systemd, which is 'blocked' on antiX.

Once I had changed the Synaptic default setting, the packages installed as expected.

Glenn