[Bug 1238982] Re: apt-get installs newer version even when older one is explicitly requested

[Dan Kegel]

Here's the use case where I ran into this problem:

The user is a small company which sells single-function boxes based on Ubuntu plus their own app, and does a month of QA before each release of their product.
They use OpenGL heavily, and have found that each update of graphics drivers has a good chance of exposing a problem, so they'd like to freeze on the current graphics driver when they begin QA, and only update it if it fixes a bug in their product.

They would like a single metapackage that pulls in their app plus their frozen version of the graphics driver.
Their install process looks like 
   Add the company's apt repo
   sudo apt-get install the-products-metapackage

And if the frozen version of the graphics driver disappears from the
Ubuntu servers, they pop it into their own apt server.

I suppose I can try using pinning to make this work, but given
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=685215 I don't have
very high hopes.

** Bug watch added: Debian Bug tracker #685215
   http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=685215

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1238982

Title:
  apt-get installs newer version even when older one is explicitly
  requested

Status in “apt” package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid

Bug description:
  On Ubuntu 10.04 (with 0.7.25.3ubuntu9.14) and 12.04 (with
  apt-0.8.16~exp12ubuntu10):

  When a package depends on a specific, non-latest version of another package,
  apt-get install fails with the error message
    my_program : Depends: my_program-common (= 57.0.93) but 57.3.102 is to be installed

  This has been mentioned before, e.g.
  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17999695/debian-package-dependencies-installing-specific-version-not-the-latest
  but nobody thought to file a bug for it.

  Here's a minimal test case with two versions of a library (mylib-1.0
  and mylib-2.0), and an app (myapp-1.0) that depends explicitly on
  mylib-1.0.

  To view the test case, visit
     http://kegel.com/linux/apt-dependency-version-bug

  To reproduce:
    wget http://kegel.com/linux/apt-dependency-version-bug.tgz
    tar -xzvf apt-dependency-version-bug.tgz
    cd apt-dependency-version-bug
    sh demo.sh build
    sh demo.sh install

  This fails with output

  + apt-cache policy myapp mylib
  myapp:
    Installed: (none)
    Candidate: 1.0
    Version table:
       1.0 0
          500 file:/home/dank/mydebs1/ lucid/main Packages
  mylib:
    Installed: (none)
    Candidate: 2.0
    Version table:
       2.0 0
          500 file:/home/dank/mydebs2/ lucid/main Packages
       1.0 0
          500 file:/home/dank/mydebs1/ lucid/main Packages
  + sudo apt-get install myapp
  Reading package lists... Done
  Building dependency tree       
  Reading state information... Done
  Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
  requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
  distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
  or been moved out of Incoming.
  The following information may help to resolve the situation:

  The following packages have unmet dependencies:
    myapp: Depends: mylib (= 1.0) but 2.0 is to be installed
  E: Broken packages

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