aptitude is capable of suggesting solutions that do not include installing the specifically requested package
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aptitude (Ubuntu) |
New
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
I came across this when trying to fix an installation (broken by "apt-get dist-upgrade") by reinstalling its desktop metapackage (which apt had removed, in order to remove its dependencies and install conflicting packages that were neither packages I requested or dependencies thereof, but that's a different problem).
I tried "aptitude install ubuntukylin-
aptitude suggested a variety of solutions to the conundrum apt had created, none of which involved installing the package I asked for. Even after trying one, thinking I might be able to install it on a second pass, aptitude continued to make suggestions that excluded the possibility of installing the one single package I asked for.
In the end it took three passes--cycling through half a dozen suggestions each time--and I will spend the next several hours trying to figure out what was broken in the process (numerous unrelated packages were forcibly removed by aptitude). My particular case will not be reproducible as it depends on my package selections and resulted from apt making a terrible, random mess of a dist-upgrade.
You don't have to reproduce my particular case to verify the problem. You don't need any of my configuration files. The problem is that aptitude is *capable* of suggesting solutions that do not include the single package it was asked to install. If a user asks aptitude to install a single package, it should look for a solution that results in installing that package and not otherwise.
ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 15.10
Package: aptitude 0.7-1ubuntu1.1
Uname: Linux 4.1.0-pf1+ i686
ApportVersion: 2.19.1-0ubuntu2
Architecture: i386
Date: Sat Oct 10 22:36:06 2015
InstallationDate: Installed on 2014-12-30 (284 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-Kylin 14.04.1 LTS "Trusty Tahr" - Release i386 (20140722.1)
JournalErrors:
No journal files were found.
-- No entries --
SourcePackage: aptitude
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
| quequotion (quequotion) wrote | #1 |
