Bug#277964: apt: claims "unmet dependencies" when it should remove the package (lots of them)

[Jan Braun <janbraun@gmx.net>]

Package: apt
Version: 0.5.27
Severity: minor

Hello,
apt seems to have problems removing a package that is depended upon by
a lot of packages (or a deep hierachy of packages). Trying to remove
libnewt0.51 or whiptail from my sarge system produces bogus error
messages, while a two-step solution (removing e.g. defoma, then removing
libnewt0.51) works fine, so there's an easy workaround.

Trying to remove libc6 looks like it would succeed, tho.

regards,
	Jan

$ sudo apt-get remove libnewt0.51
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.

Since you only requested a single operation it is extremely likely that
the package is simply not installable and a bug report against
that package should be filed.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  libxft1: Depends: libfontconfig1 (>= 2.2.1) but it is not going to be installed
E: Broken packages
$ dpkg -l libnewt0.51 libfontconfig1 libxft1
[...]
ii  libnewt0.51                0.51.6-18                  Not Erik's Windowing Toolkit - text mode windowing with slang
ii  libfontconfig1             2.2.3-1                    generic font configuration library (shared library)
ii  libxft1                    4.3.0.dfsg.1-8             FreeType-based font drawing library for X (version 1)
$ sudo apt-get remove whiptail
[...]
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  defoma: Depends: whiptail but it is not going to be installed or
                     dialog but it is not going to be installed
E: Broken packages
$ 
-- Package-specific info:

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.8-1-k7
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C

Versions of packages apt depends on:
ii  libc6                       2.3.2.ds1-18 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii  libgcc1                     1:3.4.2-2    GCC support library
ii  libstdc++5                  1:3.3.4-13   The GNU Standard C++ Library v3

-- no debconf information