Re: Annoyances of aptitude
On Fri, Oct 03, 2003 at 08:20:33PM +0200, Sebastian Kapfer wrote:
> A minor issue that plagues me as a Sid user is the "broken packages"
> display. When I install foo that breaks package bar by conflicts of
> dependencies of dependencies (you get the idea), aptitude tells me that
> there are broken packages. That's nice to know, but it would be even
> better if aptitude could display a _list_ of these packages in the "g"
> view (I mean the summary that appears just before committing the changes).
> With the current release, I have to browse through the packages and hope
> to stumble on the broken ones.
I find the following painful in aptitude:
I select package a to install. It suddenly says package x is broken.
Why is package x broken? Neither package conflicts with each other.
Eventually I find it I manually go up the dependancy tree far enough,
package a depends on package b which depends on package c.
Package x depends on package y which depends on package z.
Package c and z conflict with each other. This could be for a variety of
reasons, and more likely to happen if you use apt-pinning to use a mix
of packages from stable, testing, and unstable.
Or package b depends on package c|d. Package c conflicts with package z,
and package d just happens to be broken at that point in time.
It would be good if it was possible to visualize complicated conflicts
like this in a easier manner, without having to manually work out why
each one occurs. I suspect this might be easier said then done.
So far every time I have tried to use aptitude, aptitude immediately
decides some new packages that I don't want have to be installed and
some existing packages that I want to keep need to be removed (even
though apt-get is happy with the system as is), and resolving these can
be rather complicated and tends to put me off.
(sorry I don't have any specific examples right now).
--
Brian May <bam@debian.org>
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