Re: Using apt-file db to find possible conflicts
Hi,
On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 11:16:39PM -0400, Matthew Rosewarne wrote:
> On Thursday 20 March 2008, Sami Liedes wrote:
> > I don't know if there's any previous work on this, but since I as a
> > sid user often see conflicts in packages, and I've seen those on
> > numerous oldstable->stable upgrades, I thought something could be done
> > about it. Actually, most often oldstable->stable updates seem to me to
> > have been more like iterative processes, rerun dist-upgrade until no
> > errors.
> >
> > So I wrote a script[1] to get a list of packages with identically
> > named files from the apt-file database and to run `apt-get --dry-run
> > install' for each pair of these potentially conflicting packages to
> > see if apt can find a way to install both of them at the same time.
>
> Oddly enough, I just whipped up a similar script [1] for finding conflicts
> between kde3 and kde4 packages. Instead of finding any conflicts between all
> packages in a Contents-*.gz file, it finds any conflicts between a single
> package and the any of the available apt-file lists. It's quite stupid as it
> doesn't bother to check for existing Conflicts or Replaces entries, and it
> uses apt-file VERY inefficiently.
>
> Perhaps these two scripts could be combined into something genuinely useful.
me too :-) I did something similar some time ago, but using a different
approach for testing co-installability: the edos tools. The difference
is that this tells you whether it is possible to install by a series
of manually guided installations the two packages. This might be the
case even if an "apt-get install" query to install the two packages
simultanously doesn't find it. OTOH this is still a "local" test
specific to one distribution, it does not address the problem of
upgrading from an earlier state (dist-upgrading from stable, or partially
upgrading some of the packages).
As it has been said by Matthew: the missing piece is to properly handle
diversions. If you are interested to setup a small project to solve
this I'm in.
-Ralf.
Reply to: