Broken dependencies in universe

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Fri, Oct 22, 2004 at 12:11:42AM -0700, Ryan Thiessen wrote:

> While upgrading from Debian Woody to Ubuntu Wart I came across some
> odd problems with dependencies.  It seems that certain packages are in
> the Warty universe but with broken dependencies.  For example, the
> package "imp3" (an integral part of the webmail application Horde)
> exists in universe but depends on "php4-common" which does not exist
> in universe.  I realize that universe is not officially supported by
> Ubuntu, but regardless is this situation something that should occur?

It looks like it was probably broken in Debian unstable at the time that we
froze, and the nature of universe is that it doesn't receive the QA
attention that main does.

> It seems more logical to me that if a package does not exist in Ubuntu
> universe, every application that depends on that package should not be in
> universe either.  Having broken packages in the repository just seems
> tacky and worse than not having the packages available at all.  Or is
> there a reason I'm not aware of why broken packages have a reason to exist
> in the repository?

"tacky" or not, many of the uninstallable packages in universe are due to
other packages which fail to build, and if they were fixed, these packages
would become installable.  There's no need to remove them when the
underlying problem is usually easily fixable if someone investigates it.

-- 
 - mdz