7

Yesterday I upgraded my Debian Testing and Audacious stopped to work. Troubleshooting I found that the problem was that it was updated to a recent version but the needed plugins were not. I tried to manually install the plugins from its website but I couldn't, missing a lot of packages, and every time I installed one it requires other and so on.

So my solution was to change my repositories to wheezy and go back to the old version. After this, audacious was broken and I couldn't fix it. I tried apt-get clean, apt-get install -f and the Fix broken packages at Synaptic. Neither worked. However, I installed it using aptitude and it was installed after automatically fix the dependencies.

My question is, why neither apt-get nor Synaptic weren't able to fix the dependencies, and aptitude was?

Braiam
  • 35,991
  • Judging from this post, aptitude can be slightly smarter about resolving potentially conflicting requirement paths. Without knowing your exact case however it's just guessing in the dark why one worked in this specific case and the other didn't. – Niels Keurentjes May 22 '13 at 13:55
  • Seems this is the answer: If the actions (installing, removing, updating packages) that you want to take cause conflicts, aptitude can suggest several potential resolutions. apt-get will just say "I'm sorry Dave, I can't allow you to do that." –  May 22 '13 at 14:30
  • I would've posted it as answer if I had understood from your post that you had actually used it - kinda read over the 'after I had it automatically fix the dependencies' part. – Niels Keurentjes May 22 '13 at 15:26

2 Answers2

6

Aptitude is more aggressive at the time of solving dependencies, in fact it creates several recipes to solve the dependencies. What you probably did, you tried to install/remove/upgrade, aptitude detected some broken dependencies and asked you if you accept the proposed fix.

You didn't noticed (pressing YYYY) but aptitude did asked you and you accepted the fix.

Braiam
  • 35,991
1

In this "similar" question What is the real difference between "apt-get" and "aptitude"? (How about "wajig"?) there is a point that basically explains this situation.

"If the actions (installing, removing, updating packages) that you want to take cause conflicts, aptitude can suggest several potential resolutions. apt-get will just say "I'm sorry Dave, I can't allow you to do that"

Community
  • 1