Bug#890320: apt: is there a better way to handle the FOO-common package upgrade problem?

[Thorsten Glaser <tg@mirbsd.de>]

Package: apt
Version: 1.6~alpha7
Severity: wishlist

Recently, package splitting has become a lot more common, tons of
packages have FOO and FOO-common now, the latter being arch:all.

Now, in between the time FOO-common is ACCEPTed and FOO has been
rebuilt for that architecture, landed on the mirrors, etc., APT
wants to upgrade FOO-common and remove the old version of FOO.

I was thinking of adding a new header field to one of the two
packages that declares “FOO-common is only here for the benefit
of FOO” so the dependency resolver can DTRT (its default mecha‐
nism of upgrading everything it can is not incorrect in the ge‐
neral case, just here).

Perhaps you have a better idea. I’ll leave the details to you
and perhaps the dpkg maintainer.

This would help users of unstable, especially on debian-ports
architectures, massively.


-- Package-specific info:

-- (/etc/apt/preferences present, but not submitted) --


-- (/etc/apt/preferences.d/dash-mksh.pref present, but not submitted) --


-- (/etc/apt/sources.list present, but not submitted) --


-- (/etc/apt/sources.list.d/local.list present, but not submitted) --


-- System Information:
Debian Release: buster/sid
  APT prefers unreleased
  APT policy: (500, 'unreleased'), (500, 'buildd-unstable'), (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: x32 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386, amd64

Kernel: Linux 4.14.0-3-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=C (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/lksh
Init: sysvinit (via /sbin/init)

Versions of packages apt depends on:
ii  adduser                 3.117
ii  debian-archive-keyring  2017.7
ii  gpgv                    2.2.4-3
ii  libapt-pkg5.0           1.6~alpha7
ii  libc6                   2.26-6
ii  libgcc1                 1:8-20180207-2
ii  libgnutls30             3.5.17-1
ii  libseccomp2             2.3.1-2.1
ii  libstdc++6              8-20180207-2

Versions of packages apt recommends:
ii  ca-bundle [ca-certificates]  20170309tarent1

Versions of packages apt suggests:
pn  apt-doc                      <none>
pn  aptitude | synaptic | wajig  <none>
ii  dpkg-dev                     1.19.0.5
ii  gnupg                        2.2.4-3
ii  gnupg1                       1.4.22-4
ii  powermgmt-base               1.31+nmu1

-- no debconf information