[Bug 831768] Re: aptitude cannot handle conflicts with multiarch enabled

[Shahar Or]

Some suggestions:
* aptitude search should show results from all architectures. For filtering of search results by architecture, a new search term should be made (list of serach terms(1))," ?architecture". Short form "~r". Examples: "?architecture(amd64)" and "~ramd64".
 It should show results from all architectures because aptitude's search behavior(2) is very simple: if a package matches all of the terms, it matches the search pattern. So treating the architecture as another search term leverages aptitude's searching mechanism to allow for flexible searching by architecture and also conforms with the expected behavior of aptitude's search.

* Generally, the system should treat multiarch packages as single packages. Mainly because they are. Multiarch packages should have a pseudo-architecture, "all". For example, "apache2-doc:all". This will conform to the filename policy, e.g: "apache2-doc_2.2.22-1ubuntu1_all.deb". This will allow easy and obvious searching in aptitude. For example, "aptitude search ~napache2" would provide all architectures and to filter by architecture One would go, for example, "aptitude search ~napache2~ramd64".
 Treating the multiarch packages as if they were multiple packages would cause confusion. I wouldn't want to even go in to that.

* Aptitude should always default to installing the native architecture
when no architecture is specified. This is obvious.

When displaying package names, aptitude should always print their
architecture as well, in the format "<name>:<architecture>".

Perhaps there can be a switch in Aptitude that hides packages of foreign
architectures when the same name packages exist for the local
architecture. With this switch on, Aptitude can also hide the
":<architecture>" part of the names of packages of the local
architecture and only display this part for packages of foreign
architectures. This would make Aptitude less cluttered. But I would
advise against this switch because it could be utterly confusing. Users
of Aptitude should be advanced enough to use it's flexible search and
interactive mode filtering to display whatever packages / architectures
they wish to see.

If multi-arch is disabled system-wide, then Aptitude should still
display the full "<name>:<architecture>" format because there may still
be foreign architecture packages installed.

There should be a switch in Aptitdue to disable display of the ":<architecture>" part of the format.
 
1. http://algebraicthunk.net/~dburrows/projects/aptitude/doc/en/ch02s03s05.html
2. http://algebraicthunk.net/~dburrows/projects/aptitude/doc/en/ch02s03.html

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/831768

Title:
  aptitude cannot handle conflicts with multiarch enabled

Status in aptitude:
  Unknown
Status in “aptitude” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged
Status in “aptitude” source package in Oneiric:
  Triaged
Status in “aptitude” source package in Precise:
  Triaged
Status in Baltix GNU/Linux:
  New
Status in “aptitude” package in Debian:
  Unknown

Bug description:
  TEST CASE:
  1. Enable multiarch (should be automatic on new oneiric systems)
  2. Install an i386 package on amd64 (like flashplugin-installer:i386)
  3. Mark something with a lot of dependencies for installation
  4. On the confirmation screen, try to remove on of the dependencies (aptitude will now fail to perform upgrades when there's a package conflict w/out removing the i386 libs)

  This renders aptitude painful on a multiarch enabled system (default
  in oneiric).

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
  Package: aptitude 0.6.4-1ubuntu2
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-9.12-generic 3.0.3
  Uname: Linux 3.0.0-9-generic x86_64
  Architecture: amd64
  Date: Tue Aug 23 00:28:38 2011
  ProcEnviron:
   PATH=(custom, no user)
   LANG=C
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  SourcePackage: aptitude
  UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-03-06 (169 days ago)

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