[Aptitude-devel] Bug#1064969: apt: can't upgrade with aptitude

[Simon Richter]

Hi,

On 2/28/24 23:49, Vincent Lefevre wrote:

> # aptitude install apt
> The following packages will be upgraded:
>    apt{b} apt-doc
> 2 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 180 not upgraded.
> Need to get 1622 kB of archives. After unpacking 0 B will be used.
> The following packages have unmet dependencies:
>   apt : Depends: libapt-pkg6.0t64 (>= 2.7.12+nmu1) but it is not going to be installed
>   apt-utils : Depends: apt (= 2.7.12) but 2.7.12+nmu1 is to be installed
> The following actions will resolve these dependencies:
> 
>       Keep the following packages at their current version:
> 1)     apt [2.7.12 (now, testing)]

That is a valid possible resolution. Presumably, if you reject this 
resolution, it will instead propose to upgrade apt-utils, install 
libapt-pkg6.0t64 and remove libapt-pkg6.0.

Since that is a larger change, the conservative proposal comes first.

apt-utils has a versioned dependency on apt, which means upgrading apt 
alone (which you requested) breaks another "unrelated" package. There 
has been some debate that resolvers should favour upgrading all binaries 
that are built from the same source together, but that has not been 
implemented yet, and it is unclear if that would have changed anything here.

> So, I suppose that this is also the case for aptitude: if aptitude
> cannot upgrade just because of a rename, then this is a problem in
> the involved packages.

Note that you haven't requested an "upgrade" (which would likely have 
worked, because it would have switched both apt and apt-utils to the new 
version, and the remaining involved packages were automatically 
installed as dependencies of the packages being upgraded).

    Simon