Re: aptitude has Priority: standard, why?
On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 9:32 AM, The Wanderer <wanderer@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> Repeatedly over the years - I'd almost say consistently - I've seen
> aptitude report that a requested package change (install, remove, or
> some combination) would result in an invalid or conflicting dependency
> situation, and suggest a solution which involves _not making the change
> which was requested_.
>
> If the requested configuration is, in fact, contradictory, then this is
> of course reasonable. However, in most if not all such cases, requesting
> the same change of apt-get produces a workable dependency solution
> immediately.
>
> Sometimes (when I've bothered to stick with it long enough), telling
> aptitude "no, try again" a few dozen times (and rejecting "solutions"
> which would downgrade or remove dozens, if not hundreds, of packages
> along the way) will eventually get it to suggest a solution which will
> make that change without extraneous side effects - which may or may not
> be the same as the one provided by apt-get.
>
> But as long as aptitude continues to take this brain-dead approach to
> dependency resolution, necessitating digging through obviously-bad
> suggestions before finding something as reasonable as what apt-get
> provides easily, it is IMO not viable for actual use - except perhaps by
> people who already know completely what they are doing and how to
> override aptitude's suggestions.
I've grepped debian-devel, but cannot find an email that was sent to
the list some months ago about tweaks to /etc/apt/apt.conf (IIRC) to
make aptitude behave more sanely.
Thus, I believe there are a couple of knobs to turn to make aptitude
behave more expectedly.
Cheers,
-m
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