[Aptitude-devel] Bug#808882: Bug#808882: aptitude: restore reasonable ordering of package dependencies

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Hi,

2015-12-24 09:09 Axel Beckert:
>Control: tag -1 + confirmed
>
>Hi Christoph,
>
>Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote:
>> Since some recente version, the dependencies types of a package seem
>> to no longer follow any specific order.
>
>In which view do you experience this issue? TUI Dependencies, TUI
>Package, TUI Reverse Dependencies, CLI show?

I noticed this in the package view/screen of curses, under "Packages
which depend on $blah", Suggests is often (always?) before Recommends,
which is a bit unexpected for the user.

IIRC (it was a while ago when I checked) this didn't happen only in
recent versions, for recent < 1 year, but also happened in the version
of stable for example.  I do not have any system with stable at hand
right now to check this.


>I'm also not 100% sure what you mean "no longer follow any specific
>order". Can you confirm that they have the same order for all packages
>for you? For me, they do. Seems something like
>
>Depends
>Conflicts
>Recommends
>Suggests
>Replaces
>Breaks

I don't remember seeing Conflicts before Recommends, and I have the idea
of Conflicts being towards the end in most cases.  Not trying to dispute
that it does show like this for you right now, but in my system it's not
"the same order for all packages" with the precedence shown above, so
there should be some randomness added to the mix.


>which is indeed not that intuitive, hence confirmed. (This order shows
>up in the TUI Dependencies view.)
>
>> May I suggest to go back to some order like this:
>> Pre-Depends
>> Depends
>> Recommends
>> Suggests
>
>Sounds sane, yes.
>
>> Breaks
>> Conflicts
>> Provides
>> Replaces
>>
>> I don't have a strong opinion about the second group
>
>Indeed. Except that Provides should not be in the middle of three
>conflict type relations. So I suggest the strongest conflict-type
>relation first:
>
>Conflicts
>Breaks
>Replaces
>Provides

All the above sound sensible suggestions.


Cheers.
-- 
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>