forces removal of virtualbox-4.2

[Andrew Schulman]

I'm trying to install vagrant 1.0.1-1. On my host virtualbox is not installed, but virtualbox-4.2 from virtualbox.org is. To my surprise, installing vagrant wants to force installation of virtualbox, which forces uninstallation of virtualbox-4.2:

# apt-get install vagrant
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  libgsoap1 ruby-archive-tar-minitar ruby-childprocess ruby-erubis ruby-ffi ruby-i18n ruby-json ruby-log4r ruby-net-scp
  ruby-net-ssh rubygems virtualbox virtualbox-dkms virtualbox-qt
Suggested packages:
  virtualbox-guest-additions-iso vde2
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  virtualbox-4.2
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libgsoap1 ruby-archive-tar-minitar ruby-childprocess ruby-erubis ruby-ffi ruby-i18n ruby-json ruby-log4r ruby-net-scp
  ruby-net-ssh rubygems vagrant virtualbox virtualbox-dkms virtualbox-qt
0 upgraded, 15 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 24.5 MB of archives.
After this operation, 59.1 MB disk space will be freed.

I can't figure out why this should happen, because AFAICT vagrant only recommends virtualbox, it doesn't depend on it.

It would be nice if vagrant didn't force uninstallation of virtualbox-4.2. It would be even nicer if vagrant would accept virtualbox-4.2 as providing the virtualbox package.

Thanks, Andrew.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: vagrant (not installed)
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-37.58-generic 3.2.35
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-37-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.0.1-0ubuntu17.1
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu Feb 14 06:20:55 2013
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release amd64 (20091027)
MarkForUpload: True
SourcePackage: vagrant
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to precise on 2013-01-13 (31 days ago)

[Laurent Bigonville (bigon)]

Hi,

IMHO, this is a bug on the oracle virtualbox package. Their package should "Provides: virtualbox" I guess. Vagrant package is only Recommending the virtualbox package, you could try to install it with the --no-install-recommends apt-get flag.

I'm closing this bug as invalid

[Andrei Dziahel (develop7)]

@bigon: It does:
> $ aptitude show virtualbox-4.2 | grep '^Provides'
> Provides: virtualbox

[Andrew Dalgleish (andrew+launchpad-k)]

This is because

* virtualbox is both a real (from Ubuntu) and virtual (from Oracle) package.

* The Ubuntu vagrant contains:
Recommends: virtualbox (>= 4.0)

From http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html#s-virtual
----------
If a relationship field has a version number attached, only real packages will be considered to see whether the relationship is satisfied (or the prohibition violated, for a conflict or breakage). In other words, if a version number is specified, this is a request to ignore all Provides for that package name and consider only real packages. The package manager will assume that a package providing that virtual package is not of the "right" version.
----------

If you remove the version from the Recommends line it works ok.

I can also confirm using --no-install-recommends works.

[Schlomo Schapiro (sschapiro)]

Please remove the version requirement from the Recommends. Any recent distro will have at least virtualbox => 4.0 so that this version is not neccessary, strictly speaking.

[hackel (hackel)]

If you want to use the Oracle Virtualbox package, then why don't you just use the Vagrant team's (terrible) package as well? I don't think Ubuntu should be changed to accommodate poor external packages. Ubuntu Vagrant works well with Ubuntu Virtualbox, which is exactly how it should be. This should be re-closed.