Package: apt-listbugs Version: 0.1.47 Severity: wishlist Dear Maintainer,
This is a request for a feature addition which I would find helpful in infrequent, but recurring, contexts. I occasionally run into a situation in which apt-listbugs shows a bug against a particular package, but in order to enable apt to find a dependency resolution which will permit carrying out other upgrades without deciding to remove the affected package, it is necessary to pin one or more other packages (either instead of, or in addition to, the affected package) - ones which do not have the bug listed against them. Usually, though I think not always, this results from the bug having been filed against - if not necessarily the *wrong* package - at least not the most optimal choice from among the involved packages. In some of those cases it would probably be most ideal to fix the problem by reassigning the bug and/or changing the list of what packages it affects; however, this is not always practical, e.g. for social / political reasons. I have occasionally tried to deal with this by manually pinning the "correct" package (the one(s) which will enable dependency processing to find an appropriate solution, without either hitting an impossible-situation-requested deadlock or trying to remove the pinned package in order to upgrade other packages). That typically works in the short term, but not in the long term; if I pin the package using apt-listbugs' interactive interface, apt-listbugs then detects "oh, this package doesn't have this bug open against it" and removes the pin on the next automatic check, and if I pin it entirely manually, I don't get the benefit of apt-listbugs being able to detect when the bug has been fixed. In cases where this happens, I would like to be able to use apt-listbugs' interactive interface to say "pin package X because of bug Y" - even when that bug does not have metadata showing that it has any relation to that package - and see apt-listbugs first create the pin entry in the preferences file, and then understand that "when this bug is fixed, this pin can be removed", even though the bug is not formally against the pinned package(s). This is essentially the ability to say "treat package X as affected by bug Y, and pin that package accordingly", in response to apt-listbugs' "Are you sure you want to install/upgrade the above packages?" prompt. Currently, it is possible to pin packages listed as affected by a specified bug number, or pin specified packages by name - but the former does not always identify the optimal package(s) to pin, and using the latter to pin packages not listed as affected by the bugs leads to the pin being automatically removed in the next check cycle. I cannot be absolutely positive that there is not already a way to do this, but I have not managed to find one in the apt-listbugs UI or documentation. -- System Information: Debian Release: forky/sid APT prefers testing APT policy: (900, 'testing'), (800, 'stable'), (500, 'testing-debug'), (500, 'stable-security') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 6.16.12+deb14+1-amd64 (SMP w/12 CPU threads; PREEMPT) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash Init: sysvinit (via /sbin/init) LSM: AppArmor: enabled Versions of packages apt-listbugs depends on: ii apt 3.1.12 ii distro-info 1.13 ii ruby 1:3.3+b1 ii ruby-debian 0.3.10+b13 ii ruby-gettext 3.4.9-1 ii ruby-soap4r 2.0.5-9 ii ruby-unicode 0.4.4.5-1+b2 ii ruby-xmlparser 0.7.3-6+b1 Versions of packages apt-listbugs recommends: ii ruby-httpclient 2.8.3+git20211122.4658227-1 ii ruby-sys-proctable 1.3.0-1 Versions of packages apt-listbugs suggests: ii chromium [www-browser] 143.0.7499.109-1 ii dillo [www-browser] 3.0.5-7.2 ii elinks [www-browser] 0.18.0-2 ii firefox-ajbesr [www-browser] 52.9.0esr-1ajb1 ii links [www-browser] 2.29-2+b4 ii lynx [www-browser] 2.9.2-2 ii reportbug 13.2.0 ii sensible-utils 0.0.26 ii w3m [www-browser] 0.5.3+git20230121-2.1 ii xdg-utils 1.2.1-2 -- no debconf information
