[Bug 1123710] Re: wine1.4:i386 not installable on raring amd64

[David Kalnischkies]

That "apt-get upgrade" behaves this way as it wants to be VERY careful
and breaking a recommendation is not a safe operation. Consider
situations in which A=1 and B=1 are installed and A recommends B >= 1.
Now A=2 enters the archive with B >=2 as recommendation. Upgrading A now
would mean we break the recommendation which might very well be an
important feature of A which from a user point of view just disappeared
after an operation which is considered to be safe and might be even done
fully automated! In the case of a new recommends it might be safe, but
it might as well be that a package was split or an old feature now needs
an addition recommends to work properly …

For "install" and "dist-upgrade" a more visible indication of which recommendations are going down the drain if you apply this solution would indeed be good though (I think aptitude does it) Currently you only get a report about recommends which are not satisfied by this install, not which are going to be broken (on already installed packages). A mode to get the same behavior into "dist-upgrade" and co would be interesting, too – but not as default I guess – as their behavior is defined differently.
(If I recall correctly the implementation in "upgrade" is kinda hacky, so working on it wouldn't hurt either way)

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1123710

Title:
  wine1.4:i386 not installable on raring amd64

Status in “apt” package in Ubuntu:
  New
Status in “gnome-exe-thumbnailer” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in “ttf-droid” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Committed
Status in “ttf-liberation” package in Ubuntu:
  In Progress
Status in “ttf-umefont” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Committed
Status in “ttf-unfonts-core” package in Ubuntu:
  In Progress
Status in “ttf-wqy-microhei” package in Ubuntu:
  In Progress
Status in “wine1.4” package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid
Status in “winetricks” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in “xdg-utils” package in Ubuntu:
  In Progress
Status in Debian GNU/Linux:
  Fix Released

Bug description:
  If a user wants 32-bit only wine, a reasonable way to get it would be
  to install wine1.4:i386.  However, this is not possible on amd64.
  Currently apt spews this complaint:

   wine1.4:i386 : Depends: wine1.4-i386:i386 (= 1.4.1-0ubuntu4)
                  Recommends: gnome-exe-thumbnailer:i386 but it is not installable or
                              kde-runtime:i386 but it is not going to be installed
                  Recommends: ttf-droid:i386 but it is not installable
                  Recommends: ttf-liberation:i386 but it is not installable
                  Recommends: ttf-umefont:i386 but it is not installable
                  Recommends: ttf-unfonts-core:i386 but it is not installable
                  Recommends: ttf-wqy-microhei:i386 but it is not installable
                  Recommends: winetricks:i386 but it is not going to be installed
                  Recommends: xdg-utils:i386 but it is not installable

  gnome-exe-thumbnailer, xdg-utils, and the fonts are arch: all and
  should be marked multiarch:foreign to indicate that it is ok to
  install them for the nonnative wine1.4 (they are cross-arch shell
  scripts).  winetricks is currently arch i386 and amd64 and should
  probably be marked arch: all (especially for upcoming arm wine).

  apt will then freak out about conflicts and give up.  apt-get --no-
  install-recommends wine1.4:i386, however, will actually complete.  I'm
  not sure this is correct behavior for apt, as in principle it should
  be able to figure out that it can succeed with the command by omitting
  recommended packages.

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