Can't upgrade keyboard-configuration on Noble-proposed

[Marcos Alano]

I'm testing Noble using multipass and I got this error when I try to upgrade the system:
ubuntu@ubuntu2404:~$ sudo apt full-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Error!
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 keyboard-configuration : Depends: xkb-data (< 2.38A) but 2.41-2 is to be installed
E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.

I think because in the package "Depends" section the configuration is in this way:
Depends: debconf (>= 0.5) | debconf-2.0, liblocale-gettext-perl, xkb-data (>= 2.38~), xkb-data (<< 2.38A)

So I think it should be a "|"(pipe) instead of "," (comma) when refering to xkb-data.

The keyboard-configuration package version is 1.223ubuntu1.

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

Thanks for reporting.

Have you enabled -proposed by any chance? Please post the output from `apt policy xkb-data`.

Because the only place I can see version 2.41-2 is in noble-proposed [1], which also seems part of the reason why it hasn't migrated to the release repo [2].

[1] https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xkeyboard-config/2.41-2
[2] https://ubuntu-archive-team.ubuntu.com/proposed-migration/noble/update_excuses.html#xkeyboard-config

[Marcos Alano (mhalano)]

Yes, I have proposed enabled. In the end I was able to upgrade in a not very clean method. I manually reinstalled the xkb-data package. And after that, I was able to execute a regular upgrade.
Here is the command you requested:
ubuntu@ubuntu2404:~$ apt policy xkb-data
xkb-data:
  Installed: 2.41-2
  Candidate: 2.41-2
  Version table:
 *** 2.41-2 500
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble-proposed/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     2.38-2 500
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu noble/main amd64 Packages

I don't know for sure. I never created a deb package from the ground, so I don't know if you can answer my question if the comma instead of pipe in the "Depends" section is the correctly option.

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

>Yes, I have proposed enabled.

I assume you are aware it's not generally recommended to keep proposed enabled and install all upgrades. Anyways, that means this is the same issue which is keeping xkeyboard-config from migrating to the release repo.

Regarding comma or pipe, I cannot say for certain because I'm not that familiar with this package but it might be on purpose. Some packages do it to lock their dependencies in place. This is especially true if the underlying package do large changes so you cannot be sure if everything still works with newer versions or if you need to know what the changes are to take full advantage of the new things. This means that 2.38.1, 2.38.2 or security fixes will still match and be installable but never versions like 2.39 would be blocked. Maybe all console-setup needs is a manual rebuild to pick up the current version available or it might require further changes to the package to handle the newer changes.

The way forward will probably be a newer version of console-setup which supports the latest version, when that is uploaded to -proposed both packages will work and can be migrated together. In the meantime, xkeyboard-config will be kept in -proposed in order to not make other packages uninstallable.