[Bug 831768] Re: aptitude cannot handle conflicts with multiarch enabled

[Fyodor Kupchik]

Hi, Daniel!

Sorry for late answer, I was not able to reach my workstation to test better new patch. What I did today: 
I disabled the hack mentioned in bug description, run aptitude and it showed "Suggest 228 removals 27 keeps." That is because after last update I did (don't remember exactly if I used apt-get or aptitude) aptitude was reinstalled from official repo so patched version was replaced.
Then I used dpkg -i to install patched version. After installation I've run aptitude again and it suggested only 4 removals and 29 keeps. I decided to let it to proceed with update even being noticed that it wants to remove skype 4.0.0.7. Pressed SHIFT+1 to apply solution and warning disappeared. In general I would say that update looked as "normal" not taking in account skype and ia32-libs which were removed. The main thing I've noticed that it didn't want to remove qt-gui stuff which is necessary to get skype to work.
After update went successfully I downloaded new skype package from skype.com i386 version and installed it. Everything went OK!

So here's is *definitely improvement* for me and disabling the option in /etc/apt/apt.conf did the trick for me!
Thank you very much for your work! I'm now able to use aptitude again!

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/831768

Title:
  aptitude cannot handle conflicts with multiarch enabled

Status in aptitude:
  Confirmed
Status in “aptitude” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged
Status in “aptitude” source package in Oneiric:
  Triaged
Status in “aptitude” source package in Precise:
  Triaged
Status in Baltix GNU/Linux:
  Incomplete
Status in “aptitude” package in Debian:
  Unknown

Bug description:
  TEST CASE:
  1. Enable multiarch (should be automatic on new oneiric systems)
  2. Install an i386 package on amd64 (like flashplugin-installer:i386)
  3. Mark something with a lot of dependencies for installation
  4. On the confirmation screen, try to remove on of the dependencies (aptitude will now fail to perform upgrades when there's a package conflict w/out removing the i386 libs)

  This renders aptitude painful on a multiarch enabled system (default
  in oneiric).

  WORKAROUND:
  1. If you can survive without 32 bit libraries, just comment out the single line in /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/multiarch; or
  2. Use another package manager (e.g. apt-get, synaptic, or Software Center)
  3. Disable the problem resolver by adding this line in /etc/apt/apt.conf:

  Aptitude::ProblemResolver::StepLimit "0";

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
  Package: aptitude 0.6.4-1ubuntu2
  Architecture: amd64

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