[Aptitude-devel] Bug#1079710: aptitude: "Immediate dependency resolution" must be optional

[Matthias Urlichs]

Package: aptitude
Version: 0.8.13-5
Severity: important
X-Debbugs-Cc: smurf at smurf.noris.de

I'm trying to update a rather complex development system from Bookworm to
Trixie, i.e. through the 64-bit time transition.

The machine has three architectures installed, most libraries
are (historically) not marked as autoinstalled, and I have a bunch
of self-built packages of various historical state.

In this sort of situation it's really common for the autoresolver to not
find a solution. The problem is that attempting to manually resolve the
transition causes the "immediate dependency resolution" attempt (which
aptitude unconditionally performs whenever you change a package's state)
to take arbitrarily long. I'm seeing 30+ seconds *each time I press + or -*,
and that's on a >2-GHz 8-core workstation with a heap of RAM. Getting from
600 to 50 broken packages took me *two days*.

Thus, I'd like to (urgently) ask you to add a way to *turn this immediate
resolution thing off*, via some config option.

The current situation is untenable; updating nontrivial systems to Trixie
is going to be a *lot* of fun, for some non-empty subset of them, if this
isn't fixed.

The change should be backported to Stable, for obvious reasons.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 12.5
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (850, 'testing'), (500, 'stable-security'), (500, 'oldstable-security'), (500, 'oldoldstable'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable'), (500, 'oldstable'), (300, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386, arm64, armhf

Kernel: Linux 6.1.0-18-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_USER, TAINT_OOT_MODULE, TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages aptitude depends on:
ii  aptitude-common           0.8.13-5
pn  libapt-pkg6.0             <none>
pn  libboost-iostreams1.74.0  <none>
ii  libc6                     2.38-13
ii  libcwidget4               0.5.18-6
ii  libgcc-s1                 12.2.0-14
ii  libncursesw6              6.4-4
ii  libsigc++-2.0-0v5         2.12.0-1
ii  libsqlite3-0              3.40.1-2
ii  libstdc++6                14-20240201-3
ii  libtinfo6                 6.4-4
ii  libxapian30               1.4.22-1

Versions of packages aptitude recommends:
ii  libdpkg-perl    1.21.22
ii  sensible-utils  0.0.17+nmu1

Versions of packages aptitude suggests:
pn  apt-xapian-index                <none>
pn  aptitude-doc-en | aptitude-doc  <none>
pn  debtags                         <none>
ii  tasksel                         3.73

-- debconf-show failed