Re: keeping an obsolete package (libx264-78) removes its automatically installed status
On Mon, 14 Dec 2009 05:30:20 -0200
Rogério Brito <rbrito@ime.usp.br> wrote:
> Hi, Celejar.
>
> On 12/13/2009 11:59 PM, Celejar wrote:
> > The package 'libx264-78' is installed on my (Sid) system:
>
> This package provides the x264 video encoder/decoder (an implementation of the
> part 10 of the MPEG 4 standard, also known as H.264).
...
> Theora is a very good alternative, especially now that it is in
version 1.1 (and
> it is available in Debian's archive---I helped put the theora packages in shape
> from the 1.0 to the 1.1 version and I am glad that it now has a new, competent
> maintainer).
Thanks for the very detailed and clear explanation (and thanks for
your work on Theora), but I'm not sure I understand why this is a hard
dependency. I see why I'd definitely want this on my system, but since
mplayer can be used to watch video that doesn't use this codec,
shouldn't it be a mere 'recommends'?
> OK, but this only touches the subject that you brought us.
>
> > Aptitude shows it in the 'Obsolete and Locally Created Packages'
> > section. When I try to upgrade the system, aptitude (initially)
> > suggests that I keep this package, but whenever I accept the
> > suggestion, the package's status of 'automatically installed' goes
> > away, and it becomes marked as manually installed (which is certainly
> > not what I want, since I have no idea what the thing is - I just want
> > mplayer to be happy).
>
> I hope that, now, you have a clearer idea of what the package does (and why it
> is important).
>
> I am not familiar with the internals of aptitude dependency resolver---so, this
> is only a guess: I would say that the package gets marked as manually installed
> since you manually chose to keep it by the resolver. I am really not sure on
> this paragraph.
But as I explained (in the part of my message cited below), this
doesn't generally happen when I follow aptitude's suggestions about not
upgrading packages. For example, just now when I told aptitude to
upgrade, it suggested that I keep 'esound-common' at its current
version. I accepted, and the package is still marked as automatically
installed.
> > This doesn't seem to happen to most packages -
> > does this have anything to do with the fact that it's 'obsolete' (i.e.,
> > currently not available in the archives)? Is this a bug?
>
> The package, as you discovered, is marked as obsolete when it is not in the
> archive anymore (gee, let me see which version of libx264 that I have
> here---that is libx264-79).
>
> You can get rid of the package if you just recompile mplayer with a newer
> libx264 (you can get those from Christian Marillat's repository---well,
> actually, you can grab the "unstable" version of his packages, most of the time).
Thanks again for the detailed explanations!
Celejar
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