Let's Discuss Interim Releases (and a Rolling Release)

[Scott Ritchie]

On 3/5/13 4:21 PM, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 05, 2013 at 02:10:55AM -0800, Scott Ritchie wrote:
>>> apt should never do that, and that would be a major bug that we should fix.
>>> Do you have a bug reference for this behavior in apt (preferably with a
>>> reproducer case)?
>
>> This reminded me of this older bug from Karmic-Lucid era, which I'm
>> not sure ever got fixed since we just worked around it in
>> update-manager:
>> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apt/+bug/571999
>
> Ok.  Does that mean there's no bug filed for the case of apt looking at
> recommends on the wrong version of the package?
>

Yes, I was misremembering the exact circumstances of the linked bug.

>> In this case apt is looking at a stale cache package rather than the
>> to-be-installed package.
>
> That's not an accurate characterization of what's happening here.  The error
> message shown in the log is from dpkg, not from apt:
>
>   Selecting previously deselected package wine1.2.
>   dpkg: regarding .../wine1.2_1.1.42-0ubuntu4_amd64.deb containing wine1.2:
>    wine1.2 conflicts with wine (<< 1.2)
>     wine (version 1.1.42-0ubuntu4) is present and unpacked but not configured.
>
> So in fact, it's dpkg that's detecting phantom conflicts with
> previously-installed versions of packages that have since been removed.
> I've updated the bug report accordingly.
>

Thanks

> I suspect that bug has since been fixed, as I haven't heard anything about
> this kind of failure recently.
>

It was a pretty rare edge case then, so I wouldn't necessarily count on 
it just because it hasn't cropped back up.