Hello,

I'm reinstalling my system after a disk crash 2 days ago. I used to install my system (Debian Testing) using apt-get. This always worked and I have never encountered any problems.

I now wanted to try aptitude to install the system, because of it's better handling of package orphans after a package has been removed. I've configured aptitude so it won't install the recommended packages.

Now I have the following problem. I installed the base-system, installed x-window-system (XFree) and Gnome. I found out that my sound didn't work, so I wanted to install alsa-utils. Here is where the problem begins.

Debian Etch installed udev (version 0.56 is in testing), but the alsa-utils package 'suggests' udev >= 0.63. So, when I want to install alsa-utils, aptitude wants to uninstall udev (because I have version 0.56) and all the pakages that depend on udev (which actually is my whole Gnome environment). I've solved this by installing some packages manually from the unstable repository (udev, libc6, libselinux, etc.), but it is a stupid solution.

How can I configure aptitude in such a way that it doesn't care about suggested packages??? I can configure it so it doesn't install recommended packages, but can this also be done for suggested packages.

Maybe you should keep the sarge versions of alsa and udev packages when dist-upgrading to etch? Udev seems to be quite troublesome in etch at the moment (see the bug reports).

Do you have mixed sources in your sources.list file?
If so keep everything on etch for now but if you run into problems give it a week or so at most and it will be fixed.Its not aptitude causeing problems.
Also remember,when useing aptitude....always use it.Otherwise you will note that if you remove something with synaptic or apt-get the next time you do a dist-upgrade in aptitude it will reinstall what the others removed.

I don't have mixed sources. I have sent an e-mail to the aptitude maintainer for some more explanation regarding this issue.

The problem is that normally, aptitude doesn't install suggested packages (that's the way I like it), but if you have a suggested package already installed (in my case udev) and the package you want to install suggests a higher version of that package, which is not yet in testing, aptitude wants to remove the suggested package. In my case, the problem is that alot of packages depend on udev, so aptitude wants to remove all of them (including my whole Gnome environment).

Basically, what this means is that you can't install alsa-utils on testing using aptitude, as udev is installed by default on a clean Sarge installation.


What would be better in my opinion is that aptitude just doesn't bother about suggested packages.

See the bug report for alsa-utils : http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=325142

The solution to this problem seems to be that you should keep the sarge version of alsa packages until they've fixed the dependency conflict in etch.

Thanks Dead Parrot,

I contacted the aptitude maintainer and he told me the same. It's pretty bad that this version of alsa-utils was able to enter testing when it conflicts with package currently in testing. I'm a big fan of the Debian dependency handling, but this is just a big mistake. It makes the alsa package basically uninstallable on Etch.

I fixed the problem by installing udev (and libc6 and libselinux) from sid manually.