Control: severity - wishlist Control: tags -1 + help
2016-04-05 16:25 Vincent Lefevre:
Package: aptitude-doc-en Version: 0.7.8-1 Severity: normal Downgrades are not mentioned at all in Section "Costs in the interactive dependency resolver" of the aptitude manual. Since they are not supported by Debian, one has the impression that they cannot be proposed, while they can be proposed in practice. In particular, it should be documented where they appear in Table 2.2 on cost levels.
There are many things not supported, like using unstable or experimental, or upgrading packages from oldstable to unstable, or from a random point of snapshot.d.o to the present, than neither aptitude nor other tools warn about. Some of these combinations are not known to aptitude or the rest of package management tools, they cannot know if the currently installed package is from the last stable or from the stable 10 years ago. Even some of the upgrade problems from one stable version to the next are only tested during the freeze, if at all. Also, whether pkg-a_v1.3 is not safe to upgrade from pkg-a_v1.2 because it's an ABI breakage is not known to these tools, and happens far more often and causes many more problems than downgrades. I downgrade packages many times, if only for testing aptitude bugs, and I often experience far more problems with day-to-day upgrades than with downgrades, so YMMV. I don't think that it's particularly useful to mention/highlight downgrades, since these are not supposed to be seen by users using stable and upgrading to the next stable, which is the only scenario that Debian really supports. Users who don't do this and mix versions in which aptitude can suggest downgrades are on their own and should know how to deal with them. In any case, I don't plan to work on this issue, tagging +help in the case that somebody feels like it. Cheers. -- Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montez...@gmail.com>