Bug#809655: aptitude: harrowing upgrade for the perl transition

[Niko Tyni]

On Tue, Jan 05, 2016 at 04:45:56PM +0100, gregor herrmann wrote:
> On Sat, 02 Jan 2016 20:53:56 +0800, Paul Wise wrote:

> > I had a very harrowing upgrade for the perl transition. The first
> > upgrade managed to remove perl-base somehow and failed spectacularly.
> > The second and third upgrades also failed but less so and the fourth
> > upgrade succeeded. I was doing the upgrade in the aptitude console UI
> > and didn't (AFAIR) select the removal of perl-base.

> I've successfully updated perl 5.22 on 2 unstable machines with the
> aptitude TUI 2 weeks ago, but I can't remember how much I had to help
> aptitude (that was still during the binNMU phase).
> 
> Today I updated 2 testing machines (disclaimer: raspbian, but I'm not
> aware of any difference in either aptitude or perl) to perl 5.22
> again with the aptitude TUI, and I watched closesly:
> - Both upgrades succeeded.

Thanks to Gregor for the testing, and to Paul for filing the bug.

I've glared at the src:perl control file but I can't find any obvious
error that could lead to this. The best candidate is that libperl5.22
and perl-modules-5.22 Replace: perl-base (<< 5.22.0~), but as they don't
conflict, that should AFAICS convey the intended policy 7.6.1. meaning
("Overwriting files in other packages") rather than 7.6.2. ("Replacing
whole packages, forcing their removal"). But maybe I'm missing something?

So: dear aptitude maintainers, your input would be very much appreciated.
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org