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I want to begin exploring moving myself away from google apps, because it's expensive, and it looks like citadel has all of the groupware functions I need. So I am trying to install citadel-suite with:

apt-get install citadel-suite

But it returns:

citadel-suite: depends: citadel-mta but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

Well, yes. It does require citadel-mta. That's half the point. So why is it not going to be installed? What broken packages do I have held? Why are they broken? Why are they held? I didn't hold them. Or break them, for that matter.

The problem with apt-get is that, for the 10 years I have been using it, it has, to borrow an Apple phrase, just worked. Now that it isn't, I'm rather at a loss. I did try the -f switch, but it didn't help. I haven't made any modifications to /etc/apt/sources.list, so I can't revert them. What should I try next?

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  • I'd be glad to here about your experience with citadel. do you try the --fix-missing --fix-broken and other ?
    – Kiwy
    Mar 24, 2014 at 13:44
  • I suggest you study the situation with aptitude. Its dependency solver isn't as good as apt-get's, but since it's an interactive tool it makes inspecting the system's state much easier.
    – badp
    Mar 24, 2014 at 13:46
  • If I get it installed, I'll let you know. According to the feature list, it seems to do everything I need but two-factor authentication, and I can handle that through the VPN.
    – fastfinge
    Mar 24, 2014 at 13:46
  • @badp: Actually, it's dependency solver seems to be better. aptitude install citadel-suite proposes a solution. It wants to remove the virtual package mail-transport-agent. I didn't even know I had that installed, so removing it is probably fine. Why didn't apt just do that?
    – fastfinge
    Mar 24, 2014 at 13:47
  • @fastfinge Yeah, sometimes aptitude can get out of situations apt-get won't begin to touch, sometimes aptitude starts going North and suggesting you uninstall half of your system to fix a dependency with texlive documentation. :)
    – badp
    Mar 24, 2014 at 13:52

2 Answers 2

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"... But it is not going to be installed" generally means that a serious dependency conflict will ensue if it's allowed to go on.

Try the following command: 

aptitude why-not citadel-mta

why-not basically checks dependencies and returns the reasons it would have to not fill a particular dependency automatically.

In the case of my system at home:

shadur@leviathan:~$ aptitude why-not citadel-mta
i   exim4-daemon-light Conflicts mail-transport-agent
p   citadel-mta        Provides  mail-transport-agent

Apparently citadel-mta is a full-on MTA and will therefore replace whatever mail-transport-agent package you currently have installed. Explicitly telling it to install citadel-mta as well should be enough to break the deadlock.

NOTE: Doing so means your current mail server software will be replaced by the one that comes with citadel. Make very sure that that's what you want before you do this.

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  • This is a testing server, being used to explore how well the citadel groupware server works as a gmail replacement, on a test domain, with no user data. So that's exactly what I want. Thanks!
    – fastfinge
    Mar 24, 2014 at 14:21
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I found that installing with aptitude rather than synaptic or apt-get ended up working. aptitude is smarter and offered me resolution to the problem.

Edit: I did have to skip the first resolution suggested to get one that actually worked.

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