Dear dpkg maintainers, Let me present to you a situation caused by the change to dpkg-dev to install Build-Depends in alphabetical order: 1) atlas3-base-dev package provides an alternative version of liblapack.so and libblas.so to the packages refblas3-dev and lapack3-dev 2) Maintainer of those packages (Camm Maguire, in CC) has the runtime library package lapack3 Depend on "atlas3-base | refblas3 | libblas.so.3" 3) Up till now, it's been possible for a package (for instance, my package Cernlib) that build-depends on these -dev packages to make sure the runtime library package "atlas3-base" doesn't get installed, by use of "Build-Depends: refblas3-dev, lapack3-dev". The rationale at the time was just that atlas3-base{,-dev} are larger, so take longer to download and unpack, causing more wear and tear on buildds. 4) Now that dpkg re-orders Build-Depends, atlas3-base always ends up installed since lapack3-dev comes alphabetically before refblas3-dev. 5) Until recently this was just an annoyance. But now that we are going through the gfortran -> g77 transition, lapack3 and refblas3 (runtime libs) have been renamed to lapack3gf and refblas3gf. ATLAS has not yet transitioned, so there is not yet an atlas3gf-base package existing. But (in anticipation of it) lapack3gf already Depends on "atlas3gf-base | refblas3gf | libblas.so.3gf". 6) As a result, the version of Cernlib I just uploaded to experimental for the purpose of furthering the gfortran transition FTBFSes on all arches due to unsatisfied dependencies: http://experimental.debian.net/build.php?pkg=cernlib 7) If dpkg was reverted not to re-order Build-Depends, I could force refblas3gf to be installed first, satisfying the dependency of lapack3gf on "atlas3gf-base | refblas3gf | libblas.so.3gf" and preventing the attempted installation of non-existent atlas3gf-base. 8) If dpkg is not reverted, I fear that the progress of the gfortran transition will come to a halt until ATLAS can be made to transition (which due to technical difficulties could possibly be a long time in coming). So please reconsider the closing of this bug. best regards, -- Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@gmail.com> WWW: http://www.starplot.org/ WWW: http://people.debian.org/~kmccarty/ GPG: public key ID 4F83C751
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