Bug#639290: partial upgrade from squeeze to wheezy fails

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Julian Andres Klode wrote:

> Obviously dpkg has no --deconfigure command that you could
> use for this.

But it does have an --auto-deconfigure command that does just what one
might expect, so...

We are dancing around the actual point, which is that if I understand
the report correctly, apt does not allow

	A	Depends: B (>= new)
	B	Breaks: A (<= old)

when A is important enough to get the immediate-configure treatment.
In this example, A is "a full-featured perl, including the -V:libpth
feature" and B is "support in the dynamic linker for multiarch paths".

If A were essential or an unpack-time dependency of an essential
package, I would understand.  But it is not.  I don't think this is
right, unless that new category with new constraints on its
dependencies is described in policy or a similar document somewhere.

Hoping that is clearer.
Jonathan