[Aptitude-devel] Bug#745425: aptitude: dependency handling jammed on chromium upgrade

[Edward Welbourne]

Hi Manuel,

> Sorry that this was not handled earlier, maybe now you don't even
> remember the details, but I'll have a shot at it...

It has been a while, but let's see ... thankfully the report contains
enough to jog at least a little memory.

> From what you paste above (I don't know if it's correct), I don't see
> any obvious problem.

The problem is that aptitude claimed there was a problem !

(It claimed I needed to uninstall a browser I was using in order to let
it sort out an upgrade of an add-on I wasn't using.  It turned out that
uninstalling and reinstalling, which should be a no-op, fixed the
alleged problem; expecting the user to believe that is a sound course of
action is unsound.)

I reported all the symptoms, because the problem made too little sense
for me to explain it better.

> Probably, you could have upgraded from 33.0.1750.152-1 to
> 34.0.1847.116-1 or 34.0.1847.116-2 (the versions in testing on the day
> that you submitted the report), you don't mention them.

I didn't mention them because aptitude didn't tell me about them.  It
mentioned the 34.0.1847.116-1~deb7u1 version that was for Jessie -
thanks for explaining that bit; now I know why aptitude wasn't willing
to use that one - but made no mention of any other 34 versions.  Since I
didn't know about them, I couldn't do anything with them: in particular
I couldn't upgrade to them.

>  Maybe you don't recall them by now, but do you know why you tried the
> version with ~deb7u1 rather than the ones without that?

Because that was the version that aptitude actually mentioned to me.

> So I am not sure about what went wrong in your case, but what you
> described so far doesn't is not enough to try to identify an problem
> with aptitude behaviour itself.

It's probably hard to construct a test-case to illustrate similar
behaviour, which would make it hard to reproduce the bug.  I don't
pretend to fully understand what went wrong; but aptitude said it had a
conflict when it sholdn't have - given that uninstalling the packages
involved and reinstalling them left them at the same versions with no
alleged conflict.

Just to be clear here, everything in this was initiated by aptitude - I
was doing a routine "if there's anything you think needs updated, let's
get on with that" - run aptitude -u, once ready I would just have typed
"g" a few times - but aptitude said it had a conflict (it's just for the
sake of things like this that I don't just run apt-get update) and I was
left to work out what to do about that.

	Eddy.