Comment 5 for bug 56742

Package: aptitude
Version: 0.2.11.1-1
Followup-For: Bug #143532

I think I have a related problem. I've got "automatically remove unused
packages" set, and I've disabled auto selection of recommended and
suggested packages. Using aptitude in TUI mode, doing 'update' and
then "Go", it wants to remove a lot of packages and install a lot of
packages (like 20 or 30). If I manually re-select all the ones it wants
to remove, and de-select all the ones it wants to add, and run the
upgrade, it goes okay. The first time it happened I thought I had,
perhaps, fumble-fingered my way into it, but it's happened 3 or 4 times
now (in the last month or so), and I don't *think* it's me.

My best guess is that it's autoselecting one or two libraries for
removal (because it thinks they're no longer used?), which triggers
the removal of all the packages that depend on those libraries. Then
it notices that it has some un-fulfilled virtual package dependencies,
and auto-selects things that fulfill those virtual depends, usually not
correctly (where "correctly" == "the ones I want"). For example, the
last time this happened it was really eager to install the mips and
powerpc kernel patches packages, on my intel box. No idea where that
came from.

I realize this is a completely vague and mostly useless report, but
I suspect there may be a subtle flaw somewhere in the auto-removal
tracking...if you can think of any experiments I could run to help, or
files to provide, let me know.

Later,
Steve

-- System Information
Debian Release: 3.0
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux speedy 2.4.17 #1 Sun Feb 3 13:37:28 CST 2002 i686
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C

Versions of packages aptitude depends on:
ii apt [libapt-pkg-libc6.2- 0.5.4 Advanced front-end for dpkg
ii libc6 2.2.5-4 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii libncurses5 5.2.20020112a-7 Shared libraries for terminal hand
ii libsigc++0 1.0.4-3 Type-safe Signal Framework for C++
ii libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2 1:2.95.4-7 The GNU stdc++ library