On Fri, Oct 03, 2003 at 08:20:33PM +0200, Sebastian Kapfer wrote: > A minor issue that plagues me as a Sid user is the "broken packages" > display. When I install foo that breaks package bar by conflicts of > dependencies of dependencies (you get the idea), aptitude tells me that > there are broken packages. That's nice to know, but it would be even > better if aptitude could display a _list_ of these packages in the "g" > view (I mean the summary that appears just before committing the changes). > With the current release, I have to browse through the packages and hope > to stumble on the broken ones.
I find the following painful in aptitude: I select package a to install. It suddenly says package x is broken. Why is package x broken? Neither package conflicts with each other. Eventually I find it I manually go up the dependancy tree far enough, package a depends on package b which depends on package c. Package x depends on package y which depends on package z. Package c and z conflict with each other. This could be for a variety of reasons, and more likely to happen if you use apt-pinning to use a mix of packages from stable, testing, and unstable. Or package b depends on package c|d. Package c conflicts with package z, and package d just happens to be broken at that point in time. It would be good if it was possible to visualize complicated conflicts like this in a easier manner, without having to manually work out why each one occurs. I suspect this might be easier said then done. So far every time I have tried to use aptitude, aptitude immediately decides some new packages that I don't want have to be installed and some existing packages that I want to keep need to be removed (even though apt-get is happy with the system as is), and resolving these can be rather complicated and tends to put me off. (sorry I don't have any specific examples right now). -- Brian May <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>