Re: Can imagemagick really be safely purged or removed?

[Celejar <celejar@gmail.com>]

On Sat, 21 Oct 2017 16:34:23 +0100
Roger Lynn <Roger@rilynn.me.uk> wrote:

> On 20/10/17 05:00, Celejar wrote:
> > The description of the imagemagick package (8:6.9.7.4+dfsg-11+deb9u1)
> > on my Stable system includes the statements:
> > 
> > "This is a dummy package.  You can safely purge or remove it."
> > 
> > But trying to remove it rips out cups, because:
> > 
> > ~$ aptitude why imagemagick
> > i   cups         Depends cups-filters (>= 1.0.24-3~)
> > i A cups-filters Depends imagemagick (>= 6.4~)
> > 
> > What gives?
> 
> imagemagick can only be removed when nothing depends on it.
> imagemagick-6.q16 has been marked as replacing imagemagick, so most packages
> which depend on imagemagick will automatically use imagemagick-6.q16.
> However some packages, including cups-filters, depend on particular versions
> of imagemagick and the automatic replacement doesn't appear to work in this
> case.
> 
> You will only be able to remove imagemagick when cups-filters' dependencies
> are updated or imagemagick-6.q16 finds a better way of declaring that it
> provides imagemagick.
> 
> The :386 packages are irrelevant and only need installing in very specific
> circumstances.

Thanks for the explanation. So this is basically a bug in cups-filter,
which is insisting that it depends on a dummy package when it really
doesn't?

Celejar