On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 07:44:00PM +0100, Michael Vehrs wrote: > Thanks for your help. I was able to force a downgrade to wheezy and > install the package. uhh. Remember that support channels will not like you for that. Downgrades are not supported in Debian (they work most of the time, but if not the explosion is all that bigger…). > contesting the user error, but I don't really see the problem here. > Why should installing an i386 package break an amd64 package? Why do > they have to have the same version? That seems like an arbitary > restriction to me. It is a technical requirement. In theory this wouldn't be needed, but in practice the :i386 and :amd64 libraries will e.g. share a common data/ configuration filename and if v2 syntax is incompatible with v1 syntax nothing will work. There is also metadata shared like /usr/share/doc. It could certainly be done without this, but this would have required even more time to get everything working… If we really want it it could still be done, but for now we have what we have and its an enormous improvement over what we had before (even if the effective difference on the user facing side isn't that big). (And if you stay with one release you are never exposed to those brittle details as the versions are synced anyway, so it is deemed good enough for now) > Furthermore, a more helpful error message from apt-get would > probably have prevented this bug report. I agree, unfortunately in the general case apt would need a brain to give a proper and helpful message in these cases. That it why it is currently really dumb – so it is at least predictable dumb – instead of trying too much to sound intelligent while it is still an idiot as this could be quiet dangerous if you follow the advice of a dumb tool. Best regards David Kalnischkies
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