[Aptitude-devel] Bug#688863: non-uniform treatment of self-conflicts for real/virtual "M-A: same" packages

[David Kalnischkies]

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 2:25 PM, Stefano Zacchiroli <zack at debian.org> wrote:
> [ Re-posting this as APT bug report, to keep track of it. The original
>   version is at https://lists.debian.org/deity/2012/09/msg00088.html ,
>   the thread with further discussion (and in particular the POV of one
>   of the Policy Editors) at
>   https://lists.debian.org/deity/2012/09/msg00088.html ]

Thanks for making a report out of it.

I made a patch for this already as I agree with Russ (and dpkg) here
even though I have a hard time comeing up with a good example why.
Attached (this time I made sure it really is…) and planed for 0.9.7.6.

It painfully shows that I made a mistake in not keeping track of the
types of a dependency (aka: explicit/implicit against all archs/one arch)
I guess I have to correct this for Jessie …

Anyway:
All APT front-ends need to be checked though as the dependency itself
exists, so if they check dependencies themselves they need to be told
to ignore them, too. As you can see in the patch libapt provides a method
for that, but the method is relatively new and the previous check for self-
conflicts so simple that it could easily be done on your own.
(There is a similar one for Provides, which isn't that trivial in M-A either,
 so we might want to check for this, too)

There shouldn't be that many clients implementing their own dependency
checking though - likely at most those with own solver implementations.
Hence cc'ing the aptitude deities so they can have an early look at that.


Best regards

David Kalnischkies
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: apt-688863-self-conflicts-for-real-same-package.diff
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 4630 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/aptitude-devel/attachments/20120926/028a8194/attachment.obj>