Jiri Palecek wrote:
Hello, I have a question on how aptitude decides which packages to install to satisfy dependencies. I was installing vtk yesterday and it depends on xlibmesa-gl | libgl1. Aptitude chose to install xlibmesa-gl which in turn broke my x-window-system-core metapackage. However, I was able to manually fix it by using libglu1-xorg for the dependency (and I needed to downgrade it). How does aptitude decide which one to choose? Shouldn't it prefer to do something that won't break other packages? Or should it ask the user for help?
First of all, such questions should go to debian-user mailing list. Debian-devel is for internal development of Debian.
As for your problem, you must provide way more information than just "it does not work" in order to get help. There are at least five different versions of aptitude you could be using on whatever version of Debian you use. Most of us cannot read minds, especially over the Internet.
Anyway, installing vtk-tcl (that depends on xlibmesa-gl | libgl1 and libglu1-xorg | libglu1) on my box did not break anything.