After playing around a bit, my conclusion is that this is the old APT solver being spectacularly unhelpful. Trying this in an Oracular container (which uses the old solver but has the new one available), the old solver failed in a similar way, and the new one succeeded (unless telling it it's OK to uninstall manually-installed packages). The new solver will be the default from Plucky onward.
For anybody encountering the issue in Oracular, you can use the newer solver like this: $ sudo apt install --solver 3.0 libsdl2-dev:i386 [snip] Summary: Upgrading: 0, Installing: 198, Removing: 0, Not Upgrading: 22 Download size: 118 MB Space needed: 494 MB / 666 GB available Sadly, it's not available in Noble, however there's another workaround: aptitude aptitude is an alternative package manager to apt that uses yet another solver implementation that happens to work better in this particular case. AFAIK it's safe to use both interchangeably. sudo aptitude install libsdl2-dev:i386 The following NEW packages will be installed: [snip] 11 packages upgraded, 270 newly installed, 0 to remove and 40 not upgraded. Need to get 136 MB of archives. After unpacking 554 MB will be used. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2104920 Title: Installing libsdl2-dev:i386 purges important system files To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libsdl2/+bug/2104920/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
