tags 315359 + fixed-in-experimental thanks On Wednesday 22 June 2005 02:08 am, Elliott Mitchell wrote: > I'm doing a update from what is now oldstable to stable, using Aptitude's > interactive mode. There are a number of cases where Aptitude's dependancy > resolution likes to select packages that are unneeded. Sometimes these > selections even cause packages that were not otherwise broken to be put > in a broken state!
The code that's causing problems is not in aptitude, it's in apt (the core libraries). You're right that this has various problems, but the solution is not necessarily as simple as just using mark-sweep, because of conflicts and versioned dependencies. Some of your diagnoses of individual cases seem unlikely to me, but that's actually not really relevant (see next paragraph :) ). aptitude in experimental, which I hope will go into etch, has its own dependency resolver (independent of the apt one) that should handle sticky situations more appropriately. It's still under development (e.g., it doesn't handle Recommends yet, although I've worked out the theory for handling them), but hopefully it will make etch -> etch+1 upgrades less painful [0]. I'm adding the fixed-in-experimental tag so that I remember to close this when I upload aptitude 0.4.0. NB: to really fix the problems you were complaining about with experimental's current aptitude (0.3.2), you have to disable 'automatically install dependencies of a package when it is selected' from the menu. That will cause dependencies to be punted to aptitude's resolver rather than being fixed with the greedy apt algorithm. Big fat warning: **BEWARE THAT THIS CURRENTLY MEANS YOU LOSE RECOMMENDS SINCE THOSE ARE UNIMPLEMENTED**! Daniel [0] it is an open question whether it will be able to handle full distribution upgrades; the algorithm is expon^H^H^H^H^Hmuch more expensive than apt's in the worst case, and it works mainly because all the cases we actually generate in Debian turn out to be easy. On the other hand, there are good hand-waving reasons to believe that all the cases Debian generates will continue to be easy for the forseeable future (because good/typical packaging practices don't generate truly hard dependency problems). Probably the only way to resolve this is to try some sarge -> etch upgrades once etch has diverged a bit and see what blows up. -- /------------------- Daniel Burrows <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ------------------\ | Human beings were created by water to transport it uphill. | \------ (if (not (understand-this)) (go-to http://www.schemers.org)) -------/
pgpQzvp6k8O1n.pgp
Description: PGP signature
