Bug#639290: partial upgrade from squeeze to wheezy fails

[Adam Heath <doogie@brainfood.com>]

On 08/26/2011 09:20 AM, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
> 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.

Well, fixing this in apt won't be good enough, as that version won't
be made available in stable.  And you won't be able to upgrade to the
newer apt in testing first, as that will eventually pull in the newer
package set that is broken.

Changing the algo apt is not the correct fix for this problem.