Bug#591882: apt: fails to upgrade some packages properly

[Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net>]

Package: apt
Version: 0.7.25.3
Severity: serious

Hi,

I have been testing upgrades from lenny to sid with a tool similar to
piuparts. I ran into many (~80) strange failures, where apt takes a
wrong decision about which packages to upgrade.

All the logs are available from
http://people.debian.org/~lucas/logs/2010/08/05/pkg-upgrade/
Here are the various cases:
 package-not-upgraded/:
  The package under test was not upgraded during apt-get dist-upgrade.
  That is always because upgrading it would have required the removal of
  another package. However, in the case of library packages being removed
  to permit the upgrade, I was wondering whether it was possible to trick
  apt into upgrading the package.

 package-uninstalled/:
  The package under test was removed during apt-get dist-upgrade.

 package-uninstalled/no-removal/ <= that's where the serious issues are
  The package under test was removed during dist-upgrade, but no removal
  was neded to get it back! It should really have been upgraded together
  with the other packages.
  There are quite a lot of failures related to emacs packages, so they
  are separated in the logs.

 package-uninstalled/removals/:
  A package was removed to permit the upgrade. I'm wondering if in some
  cases, it would have made sense to auto-detect the correct solution.

Thanks,
-- 
| Lucas Nussbaum
| lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net   http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
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