Re: Dependencies between components.
On Sat, 6 Apr 2024, Simon Hollenbach wrote:
Hi,
I have not found a mistake in your considerations about "sane"
component inter-dependency.
However, package dependencies are declared upon a package with a
suitable version, whether this package can be set-up on a bespoke
target system remains to be determined by APT when the package is
installed or upgraded. Just consider for example some manually held
packages - These might break your package install even if all the
needed packages are downloadable (All the components needed are
correctly configured in sources.list ).
I hope this helps. I'd like to understand why you are asking this
question, this might enable us to give you better-suited information.
I have local packages I can install that setup sources.list.d so if, for
example, I want to use backports, I can do:
apt-get install bookworm-backports-main-sources
and I will get an appropriate file in sources.list.d. These get
autogenerated.
To cut a long story short, I was missing having backports installed
despite me having a patched version of a backports package installed. I
then missed a security fix because although my tooling saw it and
auto-rebuilt my patched local package, it couldn't install because of
missing (new) dependencies on other packages in backports. The previous
version had installed because it didn't have dependencies on other
packages in backports.
So my local packages that add files to sources.list.d now express
required dependencies - so if I have
bookworm-backports-local-main-sources installed
(which has any packages from backports that I have local changes to) I
will automatically get bookworm-backports-main-sources too.
I've never actually patched any packages from
backports-sloppy/updates/proposed-updates but while I was at it
I thought it made sense to add dependencies for those too so if I ever
do use backports-sloppy, I will get backports too rather than have to
remember to manually install it.
Tim.
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