Bug#37592: dselect automatically deselects libc6 and essential packages

[Julian Gilbey <J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk>]

> I tried to upgrade my system from slink to potato and found a problem
> in dselect. After pressing Enter in [S]elect to leave the select screen,
> dselect wants to deselect libc6 and all packages that depend on it (which
> is almost any package - including essential ones!).
> 
> After some testing I found that the problem is caused by the devscripts
> package:
> 
> # dpkg -s devscripts
> Package: devscripts
> [...]
> Version: 2.2.4
> Depends: dpkg-dev, netstd, patch, perl
> Recommends: dupload, libtricks | fakeroot, lintian
> Suggests: debian-keyring, pgp, libmd5-perl, perl-suid
> Conflicts: debmake (<< 3.5)
> 
> As you can see, devscripts recommends "libtricks | fakeroot". libtricks
> can't be installed with the new libc6 because ...
> 
> # dpkg -s libc6     
> Package: libc6
> [...]
> Version: 2.1.1-3
> Conflicts: [...], libtricks, apt (<< 0.3.0)
> 
> ... libc6 conflicts with it. So the only way to satisfy devscript's
> recommendations would be to install fakeroot.
> 
> This situation causes the problem: When fakeroot is not installed and
> you try to install devscripts, dselect automatically deselects libc6 and
> all the other packages (instead of just selecting fakeroot).
> 
> [...]
> 
> No problems occur if you remove libtricks from libc6's conflict line or
> from devscript's recommends line in /var/lib/dpkg/status. A possible
> workaround would be for devscript to just recommend fakeroot but I think
> it's better to solve the real problem.

Let's get something working in the meantime.  First question: if
devscripts is modified so that it recommends fakeroot | libtricks
(opposite order), does that help?  That could be a clue to fixing the
problem.  I will upload a devscripts which recommends only fakeroot in
the meantime.  libtricks in potato Provides: fakeroot, so devscripts
doesn't need to mention libtricks.  Although how useful libtricks will
be given the situation remains unclear.

   Julian

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

  Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk
             Debian GNU/Linux Developer.  jdg@debian.org
       -*- Finger jdg@master.debian.org for my PGP public key. -*-