Hello! I've noticed I've spent quite a lot of time debugging various situations where the debian/control definitions for depends/breaks/replaces/conflicts/provides are not optimal.
The waste of time is two-fold: 1) apt is not verbose enough 2) the cycle to rebuild/tests is too slow As an example of 1, sometimes I see this: apt install mariadb-client The following packages have unmet dependencies: mariadb-client : Depends: mariadb-client-10.5 (>= 1:10.5.10) but it is not going to be installed apt install mariadb-client-10.5 Installing.. Done! When this happens I have no idea why apt did not resolve the dependency by itself automatically, as there was no real conflict in installing it. Do you have tips on how to debug the root cause of situations like these? For the problem 2, I hate to rebuild all of the packages (and binaries) just because there was a change in debian/control and go through the hassle of updating a test repo etc. I wonder if there is some other "lighter" way to just edit the debian/control and produce new binary packages with them updated without having to actually build new binary packages (and no, editing the .deb files manually and repackaging them with 'ar' is not an option that would make life easier). Thanks for any tips you have on the topic! - Otto
