Re: APT broken ?

[Raul Miller <rdm@test.legislate.com>]

Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca> wrote:
> APT will -never- allow you to do something that results in broken
> dependancies, it does very complete checking of this at all stages of
> the installation.

How do you mark a package as "outside the scope of APT"?

> If you solely use APT for installation this will never be an issue,
> generally with dpkg it is not an issue, but there are some ways you can
> convince dpkg to install packages that breaks dependencies without it
> telling you.

These need to be documented, and you should be refering to the appropriate
documentation (eventually).

> I'm thinking strongly about making a command or option to 'jump start'
> things by figuring out how to correct the packages..

It would be more valuable to document the mechanisms, as understanding
is critical for dealing with "out of scope" issues.

Alternatively, there should be some way of figuring out the extent of
the effect of either 

(1) removing a package from the selection, of
(2) installing the package, and of 
(3) installing an equivalently named home-grown package with no
dependencies or conflicts.

If there are multiple dependencies or conflicts (or whatever) then it
should be possible to consider the effect of selectively turning these
off.

Worst case, you have an exponential explosion of possibilities, and some
possibilities may thrash the installation, but I don't see a way around
that yet.

> I have actually never seen a normal system that has a perfect
> dependancy setup when I first bring APT onto it, I fix it and I never
> see the errors again - I wonder how much subtle breakage has happened
> on these machines..

I have seen subtle breakage on my systems, and would be delighted if APT
solves this.

Then again, most of the subtle breakage seems to happen in the early 
stages of testing an "unstable" release, and it's going to be a bit
before APT has much of a track record.

-- 
Raul


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