[Aptitude-devel] Bug#406976: aptitude: source-strictness is not strict enough

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

2016-03-18 12:30 GMT+00:00 Steinar H. Gunderson <sgunderson at bigfoot.com>:
> On Fri, Mar 18, 2016 at 12:15:02PM +0000, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo wrote:
>> This specific problem of this bug report about upgrading to experimental
>> might be different because the solutions using "non-default releases"
>> are placed in another level/tier, but the score that you were using is
>> only relevant within the same tier /nowadays/ (I don't know back then),
>> so no matter how much one changes the Source-Strictness it will not
>> cross the boundaries.
>
> Ah, so tiers trump scoring? I wasn't aware of that. And I don't think the UI
> makes that clear in any reasonable way either.

With the default settings, yes.  "safety" uses a classification based
in levels/tiers, so actions considered dangerous are classified in
tiers and only offered later.

  http://aptitude.alioth.debian.org/doc/en/ch02s03s04.html

This is the reason why "keep all" is in another tier (higher, which
means "more undesirable"), meaning "cancel user request" and thus only
offered after others.  It doesn't consider "remove the package that
you asked to upgrade" as cancelling your actions, so that's the reason
why it offers that before "keep all".

(Some of these are counter-intuitive for interactive or small
upgrades, and I am trying to address them, but they seem to have to do
with automatic/dist-upgrades and being able to leave packages behind
when obsolete and so on).


>> For complex and infrequent solutions, rejecting some actions of the
>> first suggestions with 'r' in the solution screens/questions (both in
>> curses and in command line) would probably be enough to guide very
>> quickly towards a solution, in the absence of big problems like
>> transitions that make your request impossible to fulfill..
>
> I don't think I've ever used 'r'; I've just used 'n'. I wasn't aware that
> you could do much more than just ask for the next solution.

I mentioned it, just in case.

  http://aptitude.alioth.debian.org/doc/en/ch02s03s03.html

Basically, you can 'r'eject and 'a'pprove some of the solutions (or,
since the last version 0.7.8, to whole subtrees like 'r' to "remove
the following packages" or 'a' to accept "packages to be upgraded"),
so these will disappear from solutions offered which have not been
generated yet... and so you converge quicker to the solution that you
are looking for.


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