[Aptitude-devel] Bug#799987: Bug#799987: Bug#799987: aptitude and dpkg disagree upon held packages

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

2015-09-27 07:25 Harald Dunkel:
>
>PS: Meaning no offense, of course. I am really concerned about
>this. There are quite a few weird problems in BTS about aptitude
>losing track of package dependencies, reinstalling packages that
>were removed, etc.
>
>Please mail if I can help

As Axel said (and the reason why he merged this bug report with the
others, which are closed), the main problem of aptitude not informing
back to dpkg about its holds (and so apt not knowing about them) is now
addressed in 0.7.2-1.

It was a long standing request since 2002, for some reason the original
developer (Daniel Burrows) didn't like the mechanisms of dpkg selected
states or thought them insufficient, and didn't want to implement that
solution.

Maybe there are some bugs and corner cases where it doesn't work,
though, but in principle the different tools will work better together
now.


Even if we add support in aptitude to hold uninstalled packages (another
bug report of yours), dpkg doesn't consider them, and that's not likely
to change in the immediate future -- so the problem of dpkg and apt and
others not knowing about aptitude's hold states of uninstalled packages
will repeat, as with the holds on installed packages until now.


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