[Aptitude-devel] Bug#823928: aptitude wants to remove manually installed packages with SolutionCost "safety, removals"

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Control: retitle -1 aptitude offers to remove manually installed
packages with SolutionCost "safety, removals"
Control: severity -1 wishlist
Control: tags -1 - moreinfo + wontfix


2016-05-18 2:53 GMT+01:00 Vincent Lefevre <vincent at vinc17.net>:
> On 2016-05-18 01:26:45 +0100, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo wrote:
>> 2016-05-17 3:15 GMT+01:00 Vincent Lefevre <vincent at vinc17.net>:
>> > But note that I use SolutionCost "safety, removals", so that it should
>> > avoid packages from experimental or remove packages.
>>
>> aptitude never did that... and never will.
>
> I don't see why.

Because aptitude also (or dare I say, *mostly*) caters for people who
want these solutions to be offered, and because I am not going to
spend time implementing solutions that complicate more the resolver
just to avoid those cases.

I explained this to you in previous occasions already.

Apart from that, this problem is not about "unadvertently upgrading to
experimental", it's a simple conflicts of multi-arch packages not in
sync.  I don't see why you keep bringing the same issue in all bug
reports and conflating things, it's quite annoying.


>> >> I hope that one of the solutions offered is to "Keep all at the
>> >> current version"?
>> >
>> > No, the next solutions were worse, i.e. more packages would have been
>> > removed.
>>
>> You can surely guide the resolver to a solution that amounts to not
>> upgrade any package.
>
> How?

With approvals and rejects:

  http://aptitude.alioth.debian.org/doc/en/ch02s03s03.html

Or marking all packages to keep (":") in the root of the Upgradable tree.


>> > Note also that before I reported the bug, there were more packages
>> > proposed for upgrade, but because any solution wanted to remove
>> > packages, I had to select the upgradable packages (those with no
>> > conflicts) one by one to upgrade them. Very annoying!
>>
>> aptitude cannot magically resolve problems when the packages/versions
>> involved are incompatible, so I am not sure why you think that it's a
>> problem caused by aptitude, but it isn't.
>
> There were no incompatibilities in the packages I could upgrade
> manually. Nothing magic here.

If aptitude is asked to mark all upgradable packages to upgrade and
finds conflicts, it's quite natural than then it reports conflicts and
that you have to pick the upgrades one by one (or use the resolver
effectively).

So I understand why you find it inconvenient/annoying, but aptitude
cannot magically fix things for you, specially since you using stable,
unstable and experimental at the same time, and multi-arch with out of
sync packages.


Cheers.
-- 
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>