apt-get's choice of a dependent package
It would be nice if apt had some way of knowing which package is
preferred to fulfill a dependency.
For example, the package august depends on `wish'.
`wish' is really anything in:
tk8.0-ja or tk4.2 or tkstep8.0 or tkstep4.2 or tk8.0 or tk8.2
You'd think that if I had none of these packages installed, one
would be the preferred one. Let's see what happens:
# apt-get install august -u
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
tcl8.0 tkstep8.0
The following NEW packages will be installed:
august tcl8.0 tkstep8.0
0 packages upgraded, 3 newly installed, 0 to remove and 22 not upgraded.
Need to get 1269kB of archives. After unpacking 3159kB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
I would get tcl8.0 and tkstep8.0 this way. I choose to install
tk8.2 and tcl8.2 first, and then run it again and it's happy:
# apt-get install august -u
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
august
0 packages upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 22 not upgraded.
Need to get 38.4kB of archives. After unpacking 174kB will be used.
Get:1 http://http.us.debian.org unstable/main august 0.42-1 [38.4kB]
Fetched 38.4kB in 2s (15.0kB/s)
Selecting previously deselected package august.
(Reading database ... 17185 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking august (from .../archives/august_0.42-1_all.deb) ...
Setting up august (0.42-1) ...
I'm happy it didn't try to automatically install a more esoteric
provider of wish, but I suppose it's possible.
--
Peter Galbraith, research scientist <GalbraithP@dfo-mpo.gc.ca>
Maurice Lamontagne Institute, Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada
P.O. Box 1000, Mont-Joli Qc, G5H 3Z4 Canada. 418-775-0852 FAX: 775-0546
6623'rd GNU/Linux user at the Counter - http://counter.li.org/
Reply to: