Re: problems in upgrade

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, Anthony Towns wrote:

> Aha! More importantly, there's the non-essential, but required and depended
> upon by perl (not perl-base) package libdb2, which doesn't Pre-Depend: on
> libc6.
>
> I think what's happening is that:
>
> 	/usr/bin/perl (provided by perl-base.deb) is essential and must
> 	always work
>
> 	when perl.deb is installed, /usr/bin/perl only works if libdb.so.3
> 	(provided by libdb2) works, which in turn only works with a new
> 	libc6. perl depends on libdb2 (not pre-depends), libdb2 depends on
> 	the new libc6 (not pre-depends).
>
> Hrm. Further, libc6 Depends on libdb2, but doesn't Pre-Depend on it.
>
> Not sure what the correct fix here is.
>
> Perhaps:
> 	libc6 Depends: libdb2
> 	libdb2 Pre-Depends: libc6
> 	perl Pre-Depends: libdb2
> ? Are Depends/Pre-Depends loops allowed, or are they as bad as Pre-Depends
> loops?

Using dpkg in potato, they seem to be as bad as Pre-Depends loops.

I wonder why woody's libc6 depends on libdb2 in the first place.
What is the exact nature of this dependency?