Re: aptitude unintuitive behaviour (bug resolving dependencies?)

On Fri, Aug 24, 2007 at 05:29:40PM +0200, Klaas Gadeyne <klaas.gadeyne@fmtc.be> was heard to say:
> On Thu, 23 Aug 2007, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> > I notice that aptitude isn't actually installing apache -- it looks
> >like something is dragging in libapache-mod-php4, which depends on
> >apache-common.

  Just to clarify: apache-common is a 3MB package that's required by apache modules. It isn't the apache server itself, and it won't hurt AFAIK to have it installed (although it probably indicates that you have some packages you don't need).

> > What's the output if you pass -D on the command-line or type "D"
> >at the prompt?

  [snip lots]

  It looks to me like this is what's happening:

  horde3              Recommends:   php4-gd | php5-gd | php4-gd2
  php4-gd             Depends:      phpapi-20050606+lfs,
          provided by libapache-mod-php4, libapache2-mod-php4, ...
  libapache-mod-php4  Depends:      apache-common

  There's at least one bug here: packages shouldn't depend directly on a virtual package, since then apt will select a package to fulfill the dependency somewhat randomly. php4-gd should, e.g., depend on "libapache2-mod-php4 | phpapi-20050606+lfs".

  You can work around this by listing libapache2-mod-php4 first on the command-line:

    aptitude install libapache2-mod-php4+M horde3

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  The +M tells aptitude to flag the package as automatically installed immediately.

> >Do you get different results if you pass --without-recommends as a
> >command-line option?
>
> Yes, that seems to do the trick!

  Not surprising given the analysis above.

> It seems like I might to add the --without-recommends into apt.conf.

  You could do this, and some people will recommend it. Personally, I don't like doing this; ignoring recommends can leave packages broken without manual tweaking. I find it to be easier to install recommends by default and manually drop anything I don't want.

  Daniel

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