[Aptitude-devel] Bug#836265: Bug#836265: aptitude: keeps reselecting sysvinit

[David Kalnischkies]

On Thu, Sep 01, 2016 at 02:10:14PM +0200, ydirson at free.fr wrote:
> > >> I don't see sysvinit being Essential anymore in unstable:
> > >>
> > >> → apt-cache show sysvinit | fgrep -i Essential
> > >>  This package depends on init, which is an essential package that
> > >> →
> > >>
> > >> Any chance that you have stable/jessie in your sources.list, too?
> > >
> > > Yes: wheezy, jessie, testing, unstable, experimental.
> >
> > Actually only the wheezy version of sysvinit is essential, and you
> > might want to remove that suite from your sources.list (mixing
> > oldstable and unstable is not supported).
>
> I only have a couple of non-essential packages from wheezy for some
> tests, I will end up removing them completely at some point.  But

So you even have packages installed on your system which depend
(implicitly) on the essential package set they were released with, which
includes sysvinit. Your system is therefore broken at the moment and
libapt tools are trying to fix that.

The packages happen not to use that old-essential package (maybe, who
knows without checking), but they could at any point in time. Perhaps
they malfunction already and you just haven't noticed yet… You have to
thank your tools that they try to help you to the best of their
abilities!

(I am "just" one of the libapt maintainer, but for me that falls in the
same category as the bugs about that against apt: "wontfix as long as it
isn't closed as not-a-bug-but-a-feature")


Best regards

David Kalnischkied
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