Bug#131182: apt: apt-get install fails to install dependences' dependences

[Andrew T.Young <aty@mintaka.sdsu.edu>]

Package: apt
Version: 0.3.19
Severity: normal

I installed Debian potato on this clean system, and asked apt-get to
install the task-x-window-system package, which is advertised as providing
"substantially all" of the components needed.  One of its dependences is
task-x-window-system-core, which in turn depends on xserver-svga.  But I
didn't get xserver-xvga, and was stuck with the minimal xserver-vga16.
It took some fishing around to find that I needed to apt-get install
xserver-svga manually.

If this is a bug in apt-get (which has, until now, been a real blessing
in terms of getting what I need and keeping it up to date), it should be
fixed.  Maybe it occurred only because one meta-package was requesting
another?  If this is a unique special case, the easiest workaround would
be to add xserver-svga to the dependences of task-x-window-system.

But then, maybe it should be regarded as a bug in the dependences of
task-x-window-system, as most hardware these days has svga capabilities.

And couldn't some trouble have been avoided if one of the dependences
of task-x-window-system been xviddetect, which I didn't know to download
before getting into this mess?

So it's not clear to me which package this bug really belongs to; it's
a result of the interaction of several packages.

		-- A. T. Young

-- System Information
Debian Release: 2.2
Kernel Version: Linux aty786 2.2.19-ide #1 Sat Jun 9 13:24:48 EST 2001 i686 unknown

Versions of the packages apt depends on:
ii  libc6          2.1.3-20       GNU C Library: Shared libraries and Timezone
ii  libstdc++2.10  2.95.2-13      The GNU stdc++ library