Subject: Bug#4378: incomplete Packages files and incomplete distributions

From: Anton Rebhan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Sep 1996 17:03:40 +0200

Package: ftp.debian.org
Version: 1.1.7

Repeatedly, I faced problems with a new installation and with
upgrades coming from an out-of-date Packages file and/or of
an incomplete set of packages.
I have ignored missing packages when they were just recommended
but not available. Currently, however, there is the package gs_4.01
in /non-free, which *depends* on gsfonts (>=4.01), libpaper (>=1.0-1),
both of which are not availabe, however, in the stable tree.
An older version of gs, which is in /buzz and which would do with
the existing gsfonts package, cannot be installed, because dselect
picks only the newest version.

Perhaps it would be possible to automatically generate up-to-date
Packages files and to automatically check whether all the packages
others depend on are really there.

Univ.-Doz. Dr. Anton Rebhan
Inst. f. Theoret. Physik, Techn. Univ. Wien
Wiedner Hauptstr. 8-10/136
A-1040 Vienna, Austria
Tel: +43-1-58801-5695
Fax: +43-1-5867760

---

From: Guy Maor <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Sep 1996 12:32:00 -0500 (CDT)

> both of which are not availabe, however, in the stable tree.

I'm sure you know that both of those packages are available in the
unstable tree.  I don't know of a longterm solution short of
duplicating the contrib and non-free trees into stable and unstable
versions.  Our ftp hierarchy is already too complicated.

> picks only the newest version.

It seems overloading the gs name is causing problems.  Joost, the
maintainer of both gs's, offered several times to rename them to gnu-gs
and alladin-gs and let them conflict.  Perhaps this needs to be done.
Ian?

> Packages files

That is already done, once a day.

> and to automatically check whether all the packages

An automatic dependency check would be useful.

Guy