aptitude dist-upgrade keeps packages back when it shouldn't

[Michael Vogt]

Example (messages translated from german, may not be accurate):

$ sudo aptitude dist-upgrade
The following packages are kept back:
  evolution-webcal gnome-app-install libaudio-dev libcupsys2 zlib-bin

$ sudo apt-get -u dist-upgrade
The following packages will be upgraded:
  evolution-webcal gnome-app-install libaudio-dev libcupsys2 zlib-bin
5 aktualisiert, 0 neu installiert, 0 zu entfernen und 0 nicht aktualisiert.

The /var/lib/{apt,aptitude,dpkg}/ dirs to reproduce:
http://people.ubuntu.com/~pitti/shots/aptstuff.tar.bz2

Apparently this is serious as it seems to break even security dist-upgrades
sometimes.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

A problem is that aptitude uses a different dist-upgrade algorithm than apt. It
internally uses depcache::mark_all_upgradable(). This algorithm takes the
packagestates into account and will only work (that is upgrade) packages with
aptitude (sticky) state "Unknown" or "Install". The problem is that the three
packages that are held back are in state "DeInstall" because they are marked to
be delted from the auto-delete feature of aptitude.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Created an attachment (id=3952)
patch that shoudl fix the problem

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Hrm, after some testing of the patch I noticed that it causes a massive
slow-down in the order of 8x slower (from <1sec to 5,5s).

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Created an attachment (id=3957)
improved version that dosn't take ages

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Created an attachment (id=3963)
patch from dburrows that fixes the problem differently

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

This problem is fixed with the upload of:

aptitude_0.2.15.9-3ubuntu6

Please reopen if this upload dosn't fix the problem for you.

Cheers,
 Michael

[Thomas (blockme)]

Hi, on 20th I installed breezy from preview kubuntu.
After this I did an update/upgrade with apt.

After reboot I lost my corepointer and some devices, refering to another bug. I tried to
follow the bug report. In the end I found out, that my udev wasnt at the correct version
so I started aptitude.
Several packages were held back. I marked them manually with '+' and upgraded them. After
this I got a working system back (yesterday 21th).

Is this only a problem about the preview ISO from kubuntu?

greets, thomas

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

(In reply to comment #7)
[..]
> After reboot I lost my corepointer and some devices, refering to another bug.
I tried to
> follow the bug report. In the end I found out, that my udev wasnt at the
correct version
> so I started aptitude.
> Several packages were held back. I marked them manually with '+' and upgraded
them. After
> this I got a working system back (yesterday 21th).

This bug was probably not affecting you. Aptitude sometimes holds packages back
for other reasons (e.g. can't fullfill all dependencies).

> Is this only a problem about the preview ISO from kubuntu?

The udev problem affected all version of ubuntu. But it was fixed quickly. It
was a side-effect of anohter bugfix.

Cheers,
 Michael