I don’t know what happened! I had a perfect little setup on my VPS, with a super simple script to install all the little packages I wanted, including ruby, rubygems, git and Passenger. It goes something like this:

# Some non-ruby installs first...

# Ruby
apt-get -qq -y install ruby-full libmysql-ruby rubygems
gem update --system

# Version control
apt-get -qq -y install git-core subversion cvs

# Passenger (aka mod_rails). This will also include apache2
# Need to add the brightbox gpg key before installing
echo "deb http://apt.brightbox.net hardy main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
wget http://apt.brightbox.net/release.asc -O - | apt-key add -
apt-get -qq update
apt-get -qq -y install libapache2-mod-passenger

The wget and apt-key parts is to get the gpg key from brightbox. If you don’t, you’ll end up with annoying warnings everytime you do an “apt-get whatever”.

Anyway — that setup worked perfectly! Until about a week ago, that is…

Now, when I check what there is to update, with the usual commands…

apt-get update
apt-get -s dist-upgrade

…I get into problems. For some reason, apt-get wants to remove passenger. Now, why is that?

The printout reads as follows:

The following packages will be REMOVED:
  libapache2-mod-passenger libgems-ruby1.8
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  rubygems1.8
The following packages will be upgraded:
  initramfs-tools iproute irb libdbm-ruby libgdbm-ruby libopenssl-ruby libreadline-ruby pciutils rdoc ri ruby ruby-full rubygems tzdata

Someone please tell me how to get back on track again! Or back on the Rails, as it were…