Scary messages in Update Manager

[Roshan Shariff]

I apologise if this is the wrong list for this topic, but today update-manager
showed me the following message (on dapper):

===

Cannot install all available updates

Some updates require the removal of further software. Use the function "Mark All
Upgrades" of the package manager "Synaptic" or run "sudo apt-get dist-upgrade"
in a terminal to update your system completely.

The following updates will be skipped:

totem

===

It turns out that a new version of the "totem" package is available in
dapper-updates but the corresponding version of "totem-gstreamer" is not. I had
the same problem a few hours ago with a new "gnome-panel" being available but
(IIRC) not "gnome-panel-data". I've also experienced this intermittently in the
past with other packages.

As far as I can see, this is because the i386 build completes first, and
supplies the arch-independent packages, but the arch-specific packages only turn
up later. If somebody updates their APT cache in the intervening time, they get
a harmless, but scary-looking error message. Moreover, if somebody follows the
suggestion and runs "apt-get dist-upgrade", it offers to remove both totem and
ubuntu-desktop, which is, needless to say, catastrophic.

Is it possible to modify the component of Launchpad that handles this stuff
(Soyuz?) to hold newly-built packages in a queue and only upload them to the
archive when all their dependencies are available on all architectures?

P.S. Now I see that the totem-gstreamer failed to build on amd64, so the problem
was because of that, but my point still stands w.r.t. gnome-panel. And if the
archive upload queue were implemented, it would prevent partially-built packages
from being uploaded.

Roshan Shariff