Bug#639290: upgrade from squeeze to wheezy fails on i386 (pre-depends loop)

[Michal Suchanek <hramrach@centrum.cz>]

On 3 September 2011 13:51, Niko Tyni <ntyni@debian.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 02:07:36AM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
>> retitle 639290 upgrade from squeeze to wheezy fails on i386 (pre-depends loop)
>> thanks
>
>
>> But before we start waffling on the implementation, I would like to have a
>> reproducible test case - for one thing, I'd like to see if wheezy's apt does
>> any better.  But I can't reproduce the problem in a clean squeeze i386
>> chroot.  Adam, can you provide a minimal package list that can be used to
>> reproduce the error?

I could easily reproduce on two systems so it's something that actually happens.

Reproducing it in mostly empty chroot may be another thing, though.

>
>>  - revert libc's Breaks: on perl.  The original bug report causing this to
>>    be added suggests that the only known breakage is that using old perl on
>>    a system with new libc6 to *build* software that embeds perl will fail.
>>    If that's the case, I think that's not a very strong reason to use a
>>    Breaks at all since the main functionality of perl remains intact, and
>>    only one specific use case is broken.
>
> This issue seem to be somewhat stalled ATM. As I'm the one who requested
> the problematic libc Breaks entry, I feel it's my responsibility to get
> it reverted.
>
> Steve: are you OK with reverting it now or are you still looking for a
> reproducible test case for the apt bug?

I guess changing the dependencies so that apt can cope it the only
reasonable way to deal with this for Wheezy.

There is libapt-pkg-perl and when you have packages depending on that
upgrading apt separately from perl is not possible.

I am not quite sure why the old libapt-pkg can't be kept around but I
am quite sure I had to rebuild  libapt-pkg-perl a few times to allow
installing it together with my preferred apt and perl versions.

Thanks

Michal