Consistency checks of the package repository

[Jordan Mantha]

Ed Schofield wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm wondering if there's any systematic checking done of the consistency
> of the Ubuntu package repositories -- whether packages' Depends and
> Build-Depends are actually satisfiable. It seems not, since I've
> encountered two instances in Edgy of uninstallable or unbuildable
> packages (#62699 and #72344).
> 
> It seems that some automated tools could help with this. Are there some
> from Debian we could use? If nothing suitable exists, I'd be happy to
> volunteer to hack up some scripts. Would this be useful?
> 

In Universe we do check for unmet deps. The problem is not so much in
getting a list of these packages (apt-cache unmet) but in getting enough
manpower to do the fixing. Sometimes the unmet deps are quite
complicated and sometimes they are quite trivial. If you are interested
in helping hop on over to #ubuntu-motu on irc.ubuntu.com.

-Jordan Mantha

P.S. As a side note, and perhaps it's a bad comparison, "apt-cache unmet
| grep Package | wc -l" on Edgy gives me 654 and on Debian Sid gives me 704.