On Tue, 4 Apr 2000, Filip Van Raemdonck wrote:
> * that tells apt to install those four extra packages, two of which I am > totally > not interested in (the ggi/gii development packages). It is due to the very complex relationships the exist in the gl packages, glutg3-dev needs a libgl-dev which was not provided by the older mesa dev package so APT searches for the first possible thing that can be libgl-dev (mesa-ggi) and takes that. Without further input that could entirely be a perfectly valid solution - there is more than one route to take for this problem. Basically its iterative algorithm gets stuck in a local minima of the dependency graph. Regrettably it isn't actually possible to deal with all these degenerate cases, there is a similar trouble with the mess that is perl. This is pretty much due to cases where there are N possible choices [ggi, glide, neither], different people will always want different things. The trouble is compoundend by this odd use of provides - nobody has ever made a large scale construct like this before - and furthermore it will only happen because a new provides was introduced. This isn't a bug because it does tell you want it wants to do and you are free to give it a push in the right direction after. APT *does not* promise it will always find the selection of packages you want, it just frequently does. I will look at it a little more after potato is released, this particular case might be fixable, but there is always a big risk of having bad side effects :< dist-upgrade and friends should not have this problem btw. Jason
