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+ <title>Petter Reinholdtsen: Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</title>
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+ <h1>
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
+
+ </h1>
+
+ </div>
+
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</div>
+ <div class="date">2010-07-27 23:50</div>
+ <div class="body">
+<p>I discovered this while doing
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
+testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>. A few packages
+in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
+that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
+some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
+
+<p>An example is from todays
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
+of KDE using aptitude</a>. In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
+causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade. The cause is simple. If a
+package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
+dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
+ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
+because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
+
+<p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
+ perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
+ Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
+dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
+ dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
+hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
+and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
+failures. Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
+packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
+the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
+of dependency loops.</p>
+
+<p>Thanks to
+<a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
+tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
+dependencies
+<a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
+is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
+
+<p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
+apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
+dependency. Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
+it.</p>
+</div>
+
+ <div class="tags">Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.</div>
+
+ </div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<div id="sidebar">
+
+<h2>Archive</h2>
+<ul>
+
+<li>2010
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+<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
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+</ul>
+
+
+
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