Scary messages in Update Manager

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Wed, Aug 02, 2006 at 03:44:43PM +0000, Roshan Shariff wrote:
> 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?

This will be addressed when dapper-proposed is implemented properly, as the
updates will be built for all architectures, published in dapper-proposed,
then moved together to dapper-updates.

-- 
 - mdz