Bug#107380: apt is installing packages which are not depended upon

[Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org>]

On Thu, Aug 02, 2001 at 01:35:28AM +1000, Anand Kumria wrote:

> I'm attempting to install xae but would only expect 
> psgml and it dependancies to be installed.
> 
> [...]
> The following extra packages will be installed:
>   eieio psgml sgml-base sgml-data speedbar 
> [...]
> Package: xae
> Version: 1.0beta6-2
> Depends: xemacs21 | xemacs21-gtk | xemacs20 | emacsen, psgml | xemacs21, eieio | xemacs21
> [...]
> I do not have xemacs variants installed so I would expect apt to select
> "emacsen, psgml" as the required dependancies for xae. You can also see
> that eieio has also been selected.
> 
> Please let me know if I can assist further.

I think you may be reading the dependency information wrong.  Comma (",")
should be read as boolean "and", which has higher precedence than boolean "or"
(represented by "|").  So the dependencies are:

xemacs21 OR xemacs21-gtk OR xemacs20 OR emacsen
AND
psgml OR xemacs21
AND
eieio OR xemacs21

The first dependency is satisfied by an installed emacsen, psgml is installed
to satisfy the second, and eieio is installed to satisfy the third.  sgml-* and
speedbar are dependencies of psgml and eieio.

There is no apt bug here.

-- 
 - mdz