Re: new perl dependencies

[cjw44@cam.ac.uk (Colin Watson)]

itz@speakeasy.org (Ian Zimmerman) wrote:
>When I run dselect last night, there was a bunch of important packages
>that had been upgraded.  One of them was perl-5.005-doc.
>
>I accepted all the suggestions, but when I was ready to exit selection
>mode and start downloading, I was thrown into a conflict/dependency
>screen with just perl-5.005 and perl-5.005-doc.  And no matter what I
>did, dselect threw me into that screen again and again.  I had to
>force my way out with an `x'.
>
>Everything seems to run for the moment, but I am shaken.  Is this some
>kind of circular dependency among the packages involved?  Can it be
>fixed? 

This is caused by versioned dependencies. The situation is as follows:

  perl-5.005-doc (5.005.03-7.1) recommends perl-5.005 (= 5.005.03-7.1)
  perl-5.005 (5.005.03-7) suggests perl-5.005-doc (= 5.005.03-7)

In this situation, neither relationship can be satisfied, and dselect
gets rather confused. This sort of thing happens when FTP mirrors get
out of sync with each other, or when not all of a set of related
packages get moved from incoming into the archive at the same time. It's
particularly common when two packages are required to be at the same
version as each other. The best solution is usually to put the offending
packages on hold ('=' in dselect) and wait for a future update to sort
out the problem.

-- 
Colin Watson                                           [cjw44@cam.ac.uk]