Re: Aptitude question
On Wed, 04 Jan 2006 19:50:14 +0100, Linas Zvirblis <0x0007@gmail.com>
wrote:
Jiri Palecek wrote:
How does aptitude decide which one to choose? Shouldn't it
prefer to do something that won't break other packages? Or should
it ask the user for help?
As for your problem, you must provide way more information than just "it
does not work" in order to get help. There are at least five different
versions of aptitude you could be using on whatever version of Debian
you use. Most of us cannot read minds, especially over the Internet.
If you had read (at least the written protion of) my mind more carefully,
you would realize that I have never said "it does not work". I thought it
more as a feature request (or idea) than bug report. I was asking about
how is aptitude supposed to solve such situations, beacuse it isn't clear
if it really should try to guess the correct packages to install.
If you don't quite understand the exact situation I'm talking about, I've
created a testcase. Download
http://www.ms.mff.cuni.cz/~palej3am/testbed.tar.bz2
unpack it, and run
APT_CONFIG=path_to_hte_enclosed_apt.conf aptitude
Then, try to install "A". This will, in my version of aptitude
(0.2.15.9-7),
breaks package "D". However, the constraints are satisfiable by downgrading
package "B".
I was only asking if it will/can/should install dependencies so as no
packages
are broken, because it could be quite difficult. Also, there could be more
solutions to the problem (in my example, removing "D" also solves the
problem
-- it is up to the user to decide). Another option would be interactively
ask
offering the possibilities of satisfiying valuations, or prefering
breaking only
"new" packages and leaving "old" packages alone (i.e. don't even try
satisfy the
dependency on "A", when it leads to breaking a package already installed).
Anyway, installing vtk-tcl (that depends on xlibmesa-gl | libgl1 and
libglu1-xorg | libglu1) on my box did not break anything.
As you had already noted, it greatly depends on the particular system (you
don't wanna read my /var/lib/dpkg/available and status, do you?). I thought
it more as an illustrative example.
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