Comment 16 for bug 1123710

On 19 February 2013 03:54, Scott Ritchie <email address hidden> wrote:
> I agree with the sentiment about apt, however I thought it was the
> current case that if a recommended (same-arch) package isn't available
> in the archive, it does get simply ignored.

Quite right, for ‘install’ and ‘dist-upgrade’ at least. Curiously
this is inconsistent when ‘upgrade’, which will not upgrade a package
with missing recommends. Perhaps they should be handled consistently
one way or the other, prefering the safety of not installing the base
package.

Relaxing the behaviour in the multiarch case is probably not so
useful, as then foo:foreign and foo:native will unpredictably have
different capabilities due to recommends.

Attached is a test case for apt attempting to capture the situation in
the report. On Debian sid (apt 0.9.7.6) it does not recreate the not
installable result yet, so needs some further tweaking.