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

[Julian Andres Klode]

On Mon, Aug 26, 2024 at 06:34:23PM GMT, Matthias Urlichs wrote:
> 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.

Note that upgrading systems with aptitude is not supported; you should follow
the release notes instructions and upgrade your system using

# apt upgrade --without-new-pkgs
# apt full-upgrade

https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.html#upgradingpackages

And there you can mark multiple packages at a time, as you can in aptitude's
commandline interface by appending <pkg>+ and <pkg>+ respectively, if
need be.

We take great care to work around issues in apt's solver in package
dependencies such that this process works, but other processes are
not tested.

> 
> 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.

I am no aptitude expert. I am just a naive apt maintainer.

But I don't quite understand what your goal is here. If you don't
resolve again after making a change you don't know what is broken
then, you can only guess.

In any case, isn't this option already there? Going to the aptitude
settings page shows me:

    Option:  aptitude::Auto-Install
    Default: True
    Value:   True

    If this option is enabled, aptitude will use a simple heuristic to
    immediately resolve the dependencies of each package you flag for
    installation.  This is much faster than the built-in dependency
    resolver, but may produce suboptimal results or fail entirely in some
    scenarios.

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