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

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Hi Edward,

2015-09-13 14:11 Edward Welbourne:
>
>> 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.)

To try to see if we are on the same page, this is what I understood so far:

- That at the time, aptitude was happy to keep v 33 of the browser
  packages, it didn't want to remove it before you gave instructions to
  update other packages (how, btw?  Command line "aptitude
  safe-upgrade"?  "aptitude full-upgrade"?  interactive curses
  interface, marking all upgradable packages to upgrade?).

- The problem was caused when you asked to upgrade: at that point, it
  only allowed upgrading by wanting to remove "chromium-browser" (or at
  least, offering that as the first alternative to allow the upgrade).

Then I assume when you reinstalled ("Eventually, I uninstalled both
packages, then installed chromium afresh"), only 'chromium' and
'chromium-inspector' were involved, or did it also remove / install /
upgrade other packages?

(If it pulled in new library dependencies or upgraded others, that could
have been what solved the previous conflicts).

What I do not understand is what was improved after you reinstalled:

- After you reinstalled, you could upgrade the browser to v 34 without
  aptitude wanting to remove 'chromium'?

- After you reinstalled, you could upgrade *other parts* of the distro
  (not the browser), without aptitude wanting to remove the browser?


>> 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.

That  was in the curses interface, or the command line?

You probably know this, but just in case... In the initial / main view
and curses, one can only see two versions (current and candidate).  If
you go to the package and press "v" (or "enter" to go to the package
info screen, then go to the bottom) it will show all available versions,
which in your case would have been probably 3: 33.0.1750.152-1
(currently installed), 34.0.1847.116-2 (available from testing) and
34.0.1847.116-2~deb7u1 (available from stable, and probably what was
selected as candidate).

According to the info sent in the original report, you had both testing
and stable with the same priority, instead of testing with higher
priority.  I am wondering if that's why it offered you the version of
stable rather than the one in testing.

  APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable')


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