Bug#539578: [pbuilder] Non-functional if aptitude uninstallable (even in classic mode)

[Junichi Uekawa]

At Sun, 02 Aug 2009 14:04:11 +0800,
Jason Heeris wrote:
> 
> Package: pbuilder
> Version: 0.189
> Severity: normal
> 
> At the moment aptitude in sid is uninstallable. This means that pbuilder
> cannot update, and therefore cannot build. Furthermore, changing to the
> "classic" (or any other) dependency handler makes no difference: putting
> 
> PBUILDERSATISFYDEPENDSCMD=/usr/lib/pbuilder/pbuilder-satisfydepends-[anything]
> 
> in ~/.pbuilderrc does not change the result:
> 
> The following packages have unmet dependencies:
>   aptitude: Depends: libapt-pkg-libc6.9-6-4.7
>             Depends: libept0 (>= 0.5.26+b1) but it is not going to be
> installed
> E: Broken packages
> 
> So pbuilder simply doesn't work until aptitude becomes installable
> again. Since aptitude is important, not essential, and does on occasion
> become uninstallable, it'd be nice to have an easy way to work around
> this rare-but-annoying situation.

Why not fix aptitude or remove it from base?