[Piuparts-devel] Bug#588041: piuparts: installing/removing the debs with dpkg does not do dependency reordering

[Andreas Beckmann]

Package: piuparts
Version: 0.38
Severity: normal

Hi,

piuparts uses the order of the packages in the changes file to
install/upgrade them via dpkg. This may not be the correct
install/upgrade path because dependency resolution in apt-get would
reorder the packages. Wrong unpack order by dpkg can actually break
package installation/upgrade. Also when removing the packages, this is done in
an arbitrary order with dpkg. 

As a workaround for install/upgrade I can now list the debs manually in
a better order than passing them as a changes file.

Suggestions: add an option to install/remove the packages via apt-get
instead of dpkg. Therefore put all the deps into e.g. /tmp/debs,
run dpkg-scanpackages there and add "deb file:///tmp/debs ./" to
sources.list. (Eventually sign the packages file? Or set appropriate
unsigned apt flags.) Then when installing the packages, pass them with
an explicit version: apt-get install foo=1.2-3 bar=0.8.15 so that no
other version than the debs that were provided gets installed. This way
would also solve handling Pre-Depends properly.
(Assuming the debs in the package repository have different versions
than the debs passed on the command line ...)

When removing, pass them all to one apt-get remove command. The purging
afterwards can be done done via dpkg individually.

Andreas

-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (800, 'stable'), (700, 'testing'), (600, 'unstable'), (130, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages piuparts depends on:
ii  apt                        0.7.25.3      Advanced front-end for dpkg
ii  debootstrap                1.0.23        Bootstrap a basic Debian system
ii  lsb-release                3.2-23.1      Linux Standard Base version report
ii  lsof                       4.81.dfsg.1-1 List open files
ii  python                     2.6.5-5       An interactive high-level object-o
ii  python-debian              0.1.16        Python modules to work with Debian

piuparts recommends no packages.

piuparts suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information