RE: apt-get error message seems contradictory

["Gero Putzar" <gputzar@beckarndt.com.au>]

Thank you very much for your help!


@ Brian:

So "A: Breaks: B" is meant to read as "A would break B if it was going to be
installed". I interpreted the "Breaks:" as "does not comply with the need
for the following dependency".

Well, I'm not a native speaker. So maybe I should not complain about error
messages that seem confusing to me. Thanks again for the explanation.


@ Ron:

I tried to install the package "shutter" from testing on my stable distro. I
included the testing repositories in the apt-sources list and set
APT::Default-Release "lenny";

Then:

---snip---
cassowary:~# apt-get --simulate install shutter
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  libc6-i386: Breaks: lib32asound2 (<= 1.0.20-2) but 1.0.16-2 is to be
installed
              Breaks: lib32gcc1 (<= 1:4.4.0-6) but 1:4.3.2-1.1 is to be
installed
              Breaks: lib32gfortran3 (<= 4.4.0-6) but 4.3.2-1.1 is to be
installed
              Breaks: lib32gomp1 (<= 4.4.0-6) but 4.3.2-1.1 is to be
installed
              Breaks: lib32stdc++6 (<= 4.4.0-6) but 4.3.2-1.1 is to be
installed
E: Broken packages
---snap---

I tried something like that occasionally with other packages from testing.
But always with the result that I got some error or that I had to upgrade
almost the whole system to testing. I don't want that. I also tried to build
the source package. It needs a newer version of the package debhelper. To me
it seems that those 'mixed distributions' that are proposed in some writings
(the APT-HOWTO for example) are a quite theoretic possibility, not really
working in practice. At least not for me.

shutter is just a tool I would like to try and if it didn't work properly it
wouldn't hurt so much. That's why it is fine to take it from any repository
be it unstable or untested. But the system as a whole and some of the
programs on my computer have to run reliably.

So: no worries about that. I will probably try to install shutter from the
upstream sources one day and if I'm lucky I will also have the time to dig
out how to make a backport-package of it. Some fine day...