Bug#707578: apt: yields dependency problems with "apt-get install --purge libreoffice"

[David Kalnischkies <kalnischkies+debian@gmail.com>]

Control: severity -1 normal

(I thought I had replied already, sry for being so late)

Thanks Vincent & Andrey for the status files! They helped a lot in
identifying the problem here, which needs quiet a bit of a loop
and a bit of bad luck (=order of the Depends line is important)
to get triggered.


Even though apt bailing out is never nice, I am setting the severity down
to "normal" as the recovery in this case is pretty simple (re-run apt-get)
and the loops needed are usually a bug by itself, so its unlikely to see
them in the wild (in stable) and for unstable I have cooked a patch which
should raise the loop-complexity bar even higher.
(It took us ~3 years to hit this bar, lets see how long it takes this time)

Indeed, Rene Engelhard chopped the loop we failed here at down to
non-existence as the loop was in fact incorrect so lets hope the reordered
code for APT will keep working for a while. :)


Best regards

David Kalnischkies