[Aptitude-devel] Bug#653284: unreasonable "Do not install"

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

2016-03-09 18:05 GMT+00:00 Harald Dunkel <harri at afaics.de>:
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> Hi Manual,
>
> Sorry for the weird description. Hopefully this helps to clarify:
>
> If there is a complex dependency conflict on installing a package "A",
> then aptitude suggests several solutions to resolve the conflict.
> I have to select one of these solutions using [,], [.] and [!].
>
> Sometimes aptitude suggests quite a number of solutions having one
> thing in common: Keeping package "A" uninstalled.
>
> I understand that not installing "A" is *one* way to resolve the
> conflict, but I have no idea why aptitude suggests to remove other
> packages together with "keep A uninstalled".

If the actions to all other packages is "remove", not adding some more
"positive" actions here and there (upgrade) it is indeed too
suboptimal to be considered a solution worth considering instead of
just keeping uninstalled.


> Its hard to reproduce. I will send you a screen dump when I run
> into this problem again.

OK, thanks.

I think that there might be duplicates, some of them are old, but
probably some are fresh enough.  I might even have stumbled over it
now and then, but since the resolver gives very bad solutions so
often, I skip over the bad solutions so quickly that I don't always
pay attention.  So I'll take a look at this along to other reports at
some point, although it's always daunting.

One of the things that might have made it worse is enabling
multi-arch, which I did a few years ago.


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