[Aptitude-devel] Bug#137771: #137771: aptitude's vs dpkg's hold state (was: Processed: more bts etc.)

[Daniel Hartwig]

On 5 October 2012 10:44, Daniel Hartwig <mandyke at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I browsed through the merged bugs, but the only hint I found so far
>> about the issue described in http://bugs.debian.org/137771 is in
>> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=220794#20:
>>
>> "the databases do not contain exactly equivalent information, and
>> there is no one-to-one translation between them" (But it's not
>> mentioned what the differences actually are.)
>
> I have seen this comment (quite old) but not investigated its claim
> yet.  I *suspect* that it no longer applies and was originally to do
> with MarkInstall, etc. not respecting dselect holds, or something
> similar.
>
> Burrows submitted functionality to APT [2] to support this which has
> been applied for some time and now APT does now respect the dselect
> holds.  This cleaned up a lot of the issues users were expecting, but
> the greater problem of aptitude holds not being respected by other
> tools remains.
>
> [2] http://bugs.debian.org/470035

Something that anyone could do is to investigate this comment by
Burrows and/or determine if there is any conceptual difference between
the intentions of the current “aptitude hold” and “apt-mark hold”.
Both seem to be about preventing a package from being upgraded or
removed (etc.) by actions such as dist-upgrade, or installing/removing
another package, but is there anything extra intended by “aptitude
hold” which is not covered by “apt-mark hold”?

Take a look at the documentation for each, maybe have a poke around
the code, and see what the implications are.

The results of such an investigation will make it much easier for
developers to move forward on this.

Regards