[Aptitude-devel] Bug#854668: aptitude gets confused about packages to remove and its dependencies to keep

[Harald Dunkel]

Package: aptitude
Version: 0.8.5-1

Sometimes aptitude refuses to keep packages that have been
marked as automatically installed. Steps to reproduce:

install stretch in a container and run it
	lxc-create -t debian -n sample -- -r stretch
	lxc-start -n sample -F

in the container
	export TERM=xterm
	apt update
	apt install aptitude
	aptitude

in aptitude
	press '[' on "Installed Package"
	press 'M' to mark all installed packages as automatically
	  installed
	search for "openssh-client". Its marked for removal,
	  together with openssh-server and openssh-sftp-server
	press '+' (or '=') on openssh-client to mark it as manually
	  installed. Aptitude complains about a conflict.
	hit 'e' to examine. aptitude suggests to keep a set of other
	  packages, all marked as automatically installed. Why
	  doesn't it by default without asking?

Problem is, that aptitude doesn't examine the dependencies of
openssh-client to keep the appropriate packages, as Jessie's
aptitude did. openssh-client is an easy case, because there is
only one solution to resolve the conflict (that actually doesn't
exist), but on complex dependency trees this can get pretty
annoying.


Regards
Harri