Re: How do I trace aptitude dependencies?

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

"Bryan Donlan" <bdonlan@gmail.com> writes:

> On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 2:14 AM, Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
>> "Bryan Donlan" <bdonlan@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>  > Currently I have a situation where attempting to upgrade imagemagick
>>  > from version 7:6.2.4.5.dfsg1-1+lenny1 to version 7:6.3.7.9.dfsg1-2+b1
>>  > pulls in over 200mb of dependencies, including mozilla-browser,
>>  > iceape-browser, and half of gnome.
>>
>>  Both devscripts and djvulibre have some really unfortunate Recommends
>>  right now.  I've been doing selected dist-upgrades with aptitude -R (make
>>  sure that you use the unstable aptitude or -R doesn't work).
>
> That may be so, but why is aptitude claiming that www-browser is
> pulling in things when www-browser is already satisfied?

This usualy happens if you have something like

Package: something
Depends: bar | foo

Package: something-else
Conflicts: libfoo (<< 1.2-3)

Package: foo
Depends: libfoo

and the installed foo and libfoo is versions 1.1-1. Sometimes the
search then sees that foo needs to be removed, can't be updated just
jet or is plain too old and adds bar to the list of packages to
install. Only later in the process it finds is can actually update foo
and you end up with both.


I recommend to always do an upgrade before doing a dist-upgrade (or
install of something pulling in 200mb). The upgrade will never install
new or remove packages so it is save. It usualy reduces the number of
packages to something where the search algorithm doesn't go wrong.

MfG
        Goswin