Bug#565207: tasksel: no selections results in exim being replaced by citadel
On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 6:05 PM, Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> wrote:
> Sparr wrote:
>> I started with a fresh install from a squeeze netinst CD. During the
>> install I deselected all tasks (the last one was selected by default,
>> I believe it was something like "common tools").
>> I upgraded to unstable via apt-get dist-upgrade.
>> I ran tasksel. The list of tasks was slightly different than during
>> install, and Mail Server was already checked. I unchecked it, leaving
>> nothing checked, and opted to Continue. Over the next few dialogs
>> this resulted in most of exim4 being uninstalled and citadel
>> (citadel-server in particular) being installed and configured. This
>> behavior seems odd, possibly buggy.
>
> When you told tasksel to remove Standard system, it removed exim4. Many
> packages depend on exim4 | mail-transport-agent, and apparently one was
> installed during the same aptitude run. So, aptitude, having just been
> told to remove exim4, is forced to satisfy that dependency by picking a
> mail-transport-agent providing package at random.
During the original install it may have been "Standard system
utilities" that I unchecked. Regardless, I still ended up with exim4
installed (which seems normal). The action that resulted in exim4
being uninstalled was the deselection of "Mail server" the second time
that I ran tasksel (which again seems normal). The issue is that
there was no indication that I was installing anything the second
time, so the issue that I am reporting is possibly one of package
dependencies but more likely just a user interface concern, in which a
purely "remove" command results in "install" actions. If unchecking
something in tasksel causes dependency problems, I think it is more
likely that the user would want the original package kept, or the
DEPENDSing packages removed, than some random third package installed.
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