On Sat, Jan 07, 2006 at 12:51:55AM +0100, Jiří Paleček <jpalecek@web.de> was heard to say: > 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. The problem is that of the five versions Linas referred to, there are at least two separate ways of resolving such situations, which are likely to behave differently in your case. > 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". The version in unstable (0.4.*) can calculate every (interesting) solution to a given dependency problem [0] and will show as many as you ask for. > 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. Actually, I often end up loading other people's system state files in the course of bug-hunting. Daniel [0] alert readers will note that the caveat "if the user waits for a sufficient amount of time" has to be added here; however, this is typically much less than one second per solution on my hardware.
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