Yesterday morning, I had some talk with Matt about the bug #283923 (Some OpenOffice packages fails to install properly during a fully automated install).
For resuming, this bug is experienced when doing installation of the desktop task from tasksel, most often on scratch sarge installs. Up to now, it happened only on some localized installs, but it seems, according to Andrew Flint, that it now occurs on English installs (ie default installs). In #283923, Chris Halls, speaking on behalf of Debian OO maintainers, suggested that this bug could indeed be #172339 (Packages with circular dependencies may fail due to being configured in different dpkg invocations when installing many packages). Joey Hess and the d-i team then removed some packages from the desktop languages tasks so that the bug is not experienced anymore...but indeed, it was still there, just hidden under the rug..:-) Finally, Matt rebuilt the APT package yesterday by increasing the configurable limits for the length of the dpkg command line again (it was already done on July 17th 2003, in 0.5.5). Matt made these packages available on http://people.debian.org/~mdz/apt-0.5.27.2/ (i386 only) and asked me for testing. IT WORKS. This morning, I ran an automated test in Bulgarian, which I knew was failing. With the "normal" APT from sarge, it failed as expected. Doing the very same test, but after installing the new 0.5.7.2 version of APT before running tasksel, completely succeeded. So, as a conclusion, I think that this new build allows closing #283923, probably keep #172339 opened at a lower priority (after unmerging it) and very probably add again the myspell-xx packages to languages tasks in tasksel. Thanks a lot to Matt for the fix : this is a huge improvement for the installer, from the user point of view. Matt, btw, Joey mentioned me yesterday that the change indeed does not appear in apt's changelog. --
