[Aptitude-devel] Bug#671439: aptitude have unmet dependencies on libapt-pkg4.10 on alpha and other archs

[Daniel Hartwig]

On 4 May 2012 11:48, Witold Baryluk <baryluk at smp.if.uj.edu.pl> wrote:
> The following packages have unmet dependencies:
>  aptitude : Depends: libapt-pkg4.10 but it is not installable
>            Depends: libept1 but it is not going to be installed
>            Recommends: aptitude-doc-en but it is not going to be installed or
>                        aptitude-doc
>            Recommends: libparse-debianchangelog-perl but it is not going to be installed
> E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

>
> This is because libapt-pkg4.12 is installed due new version of apt.
>
> On other architectures aptitude have correct dependencies, but on alpha and few others,
> it still depends on libapt-pkg4.10 which was actually virtually provided by apt.
>
> Now with newer version of apt, libapt-pkg is separate real package,
> and apt is depending on it. It also cannot be coinstalled with previous
> versions (because it was virtual is one of the reasons).

Hello

The archs involved are: alpha, m68k, mipsel, powerpcspe, s390x, sh4, sparc64.

Due to the bump from libapt-pkg4.10 to 4.12 aptitude needs to be
rebuilt on each arch to update.  This has not yet happened on the
effected archs.

According to buildd logs[1,2] the main blocker for most is
uninstallable build depends: directly, either debhelper or libept-dev,
but you can follow the chain of uninstallable dependencies back from
there.

[1] https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=aptitude
[2] http://buildd.debian-ports.org/status/package.php?p=aptitude

The only official archs involved -- mipsel, s390x -- have build
failures.  mipsel is due to a FTBFS which is fixed in the next
release; 390x provides no information on why it failed, but the
buildds are noticeably behind on that arch anyway.

This bug will be closed with the next upload, which should bring all
official archs back to a usable state.  The unofficial ports should
eventually catch up and this is not a problem specific to aptitude.

>
> I think aptitude should just depend on libapt-pkg4.12 probably.
> Why alpha, hppa and this few other archs (most of them are unofficial ports) have
> this separate depenency in first place?

Aptitude build-depends on libapt-pkg-dev which will bring in whatever
the current libapt-pkg is.  IMO the current dependency is versioned
correctly.

Regards