On 12/29/2017 07:53 PM, Tony Rodriguez wrote: > For some reason I am unable to install those packages because of > missing dependencies. Wondering if I am using the best repo for latest > packages?
The problem usually is that some packages fail to build from source in their latest versions and hence they become uninstallable as the packages in question remain in their old versions while their dependencies get updated. For example, if Firefox 52 on sparc64 was built against libpng12 but is then replaced by Firefox 57 which builds against libpng16 and then Firefox 57 does not build on sparc64 while libpng12 gets replaced by libpng16 in the archives, the latest version you will have on sparc64 will still be Firefox 52 which requires libpng12 which doesn't exist anymore as it was automatically removed from the FTP servers when libpng12 was replaced by libpng16. This issue only exists in Debian Ports. Debian's release architectures don't have this issue as the infrastructure there makes sure no packages are deleted if the removal would make other packages uninstallable. The feature is called "cruft" and you might have already seen that term in the Debian PTS (package tracking system). The reason why the cruft feature is missing in Debian Ports is the fact that Ports uses the Mini Debian Archive Kit (Mini DAK) while the release architectures use DAK which has more features than Mini DAK. James Clarke is actually working on migrating Ports from Mini DAK to DAK so we get the cruft feature as it is also required for the buildd infrastructure to prevent packages from becoming BD-Uninstallable (i.e. their build dependencies can no longer be installed), but that migration process requires some modifications to DAK to adopt it to Debian Ports which isn't a project that can be done over night as you can imagine. So, the gist is: It's a currently known and inevitable problem with all Debian Ports architectures which you currently can only work around by adding Debian Snapshots (snapshot.debian.org) to your /etc/apt/sources.list to be able to install the missing dependencies from there but it will be hopefully fixed in the future making the workaround redundant. Adrian -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer - [email protected] `. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - [email protected] `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
