[Aptitude-devel] Bug#250120: aptitude: aptitude does not preserve reinstall flag

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Control: unmerge -1
Control: tags -1 - confirmed + wontfix
Control: close -1


Hi,

2004-05-20 23:45 Daniel Burrows:
>tags 250120 + wontfix
>thanks
>
>On Thu, May 20, 2004 at 07:56:39PM +0200, Daniel Skarda <0rfelyus at hobitin.ucw.cz> was heard to say:
>> Package: aptitude
>> Version: 0.2.14.1-2
>> Severity: normal
>>
>>   Due to disk failure I had to reinstall many packages. I marked packages with 'r'
>> and start reinstallation. There were some errors during reinstallation, so apt
>> reinstalled some packages successfully, some of packages are not configured  and
>> some are not unpacked at all.
>>
>>   The problem is that now, after I returned back to aptitude screen, I can not
>> distinguish between reinstalled packages and not yet processed packages, because
>> aptitude clears 'r' flags from all packages (which is quite frustrating, since
>> there were _many_ packages to reinstalll).
>
>  See #167236, #121346.  It's impossible to tell whether a
>reinstallation succeeded, both permanent reinstalls and impermanent
>reinstalls will cause problems sometimes, and permanent reinstalls
>seem to generally be much more annoying.
>
>  Someday, when dpkg can tell apt that a particular package installation
>succeeded and apt uses the information, this bug can be closed.

I think that even if dpkg is able to tell this nowadays (see other
comments in the report), this is quite a corner case, and in such
disaster scenarios one can install in small groups or just reinstall
everything and wait for longer.  I think that complicating the design of
aptitude in this case is not worth it, as the original developer says,
so marking as +wontfix and closing after all these years.

Now, this is different from the merged reports, in which the state is
not saved when quitting aptitude or becoming root, so dettaching.


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