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

[ydirson at free.fr]

----- Mail original -----
> De: "David Kalnischkies" <david at kalnischkies.de>
> À: ydirson at free.fr, 836265 at bugs.debian.org
> Envoyé: Jeudi 1 Septembre 2016 16:20:55
> Objet: Re: [Aptitude-devel] Bug#836265: aptitude: keeps reselecting sysvinit
> 
> 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!

:)

Sure for the general case, but (to just take my situation as an example)
I doubt that a couple of video libs and tools have such a tight coupling
the essential packages.  I'm still feeling that I know what I'm doing :)