[Pkg-pascal-devel] Bug#906322: fpc dependencies are too complex, confusing apt solver

[Paul Gevers]

Dear Julian,

Thanks for contacting us for this issue.

On 17-08-18 09:45, Julian Andres Klode wrote:
> fpc provides a lot of packages, both in versioned and
> unversioned variants. All versioned packages Break the
> unversioned fpc package like fpc-$foo-3.0.4 Breaks
> fpc (<= 3.0.4).

We have added this to make sure that people that have Lazarus (not fpc,
but related) upstream packages installed (which only provide a
monolithic fpc package) are able to upgrade once Debian ships packages
from the same upstream version. From earlier discussion with Lazarus
upstream, I don't believe they will change their idea about Debian packages.

> This means that while the packages are versioned, they
> are not co-installable, rendering the versioning useless.

I hope I reasoned why this is not useless. Co-installability is not our
worries here.

> This is causing significant trouble for the apt resolver,
> as it tries to decide what to do with the upgrade. Upgrading
> fpc means removing a lot of packages and installing a lot of
> new ones, and it's not happy about it.>
> We just noticed an upgrade failure in Ubuntu, because the
> solver was incapable of upgrading fpc. It kept jumping back
> and forth between upgrading fpc and keeping it and eventually
> gave up.
> 
> I have not tested it, but I'd expect a switch to unversioned
> packages to solve the issues. I'll try to setup a test case,
> and report back with the results.

If we know what is causing the problem, I'm willing to help fix the
situation, but dropping the versions is very much undesirable.

Paul

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