Ticket #451 (Fixed)Tue Apr 24 23:02:58 UTC 2018

PackMan version mismatch in Pi image

Details by Chris Mahoney (1684):

The RISC OS 5.24 Raspberry Pi image has PackMan preinstalled. It seems that several apps were previously installed through PackMan at some stage, but have subsequently been upgraded outside of PackMan. PackMan therefore “thinks” that the previous versions are still installed.

For example, StrongHelp 2.90 is preinstalled in the 5.24 image. However, PackMan reports that the currently-installed version is 2.87. Asking PackMan to install the upgrade results in “Unable to install/update! One or more files conflict with files already on your disk”. While there is an option to continue anyway, it’s not a good user experience.

PackMan itself is also affected; it thinks that it’s version 0.8.3 and offers to update itself to 0.9.1, but again it conflicts when you try to do so.

There seem to be three options:
- Clean up the “broken” installations and freshly reinstall everything through PackMan (e.g. tell PackMan to remove StrongHelp, then manually remove the lingering !StrongHlp app, and finally reinstall StrongHelp through PackMan). There are only a handful of apps preinstalled so this shouldn’t be too much work.
- Clean up the broken installations in the same way, then reinstall the new versions outside of PackMan (so that PackMan doesn’t try to “manage” them). This will stop PackMan from offering updates, so in my opinion it isn’t an ideal option.
- Finally, the bulldozer solution is to remove PackMan entirely. I don’t recommend this :)