[Fink-users] installing gnumeric-0.76-1 with node already exists errors

[Thomas P. II <tjp...@ma...>]

(I'm lacking some details because at the time I didn't have a large enough 
buffer for my terminal.)

I tried installing gnumeric-0.76-1 (unstable) in one of the usual ways, in 
this case I copied the .info file from unstable to local and then used 
"fink install".  Right at the beginning, but before it downloaded anything,
  it complained the node for gnome-print already existed and quit.  I had 
previously checked the dependencies and knew I already had gnome-print 
installed and that gnumeric didn't depend on a specific version, and then 
checked again after this error and couldn't figure out why this was a 
problem.

It turned out a newer version of gnome-print was available, but not 
installed yet.  Is this what is meant by the gnome-print node already 
exists?

I updated gnome-print first and tried installing gnumeric again and it no 
longer complained about it.  However, it next complained about the libxml 
node already existing, which turned out to have an update too, even though 
gnumeric's dependency didn't specify a version for libxml either.  
Updating libxml before continuing with gnumeric eliminated that error.  
After that, fink was able to successfully install gnumeric-0.76 without 
any further problems.

Perhaps I should have just done a "fink update-all" and maybe that would 
have done it for me without giving the node exists error messages, 
especially since I suddenly had updates available for several packages 
since the fink 0.9.5 release.  I didn't do that because I rather know why 
a program stops working (if it does stop working) and that can be hard to 
figure out when a lot of changes have been made such as with an 
"update-all".

So, I guess this leads to the point of the "node already exists" error 
message being rather vague.  It doesn't give much of a hint of what to do 
about it.  If this error occurs because fink prefers a previously 
installed package be updated before a package which depends on it is 
installed, then I would think fink would handle this by updating the 
package itself and not choking on it.  But I don't really know if this is 
the issue, just that the error message isn't very helpful.

Any ideas what might be going on?

--  Thom