Bug#1113744: Solver is making weird decisions when picking one of multiple supported dependencies

Aaron Rainbolt <[email protected]> Thu, 2 Oct 2025 23:05:30 -0500

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.apt.devel
Message-ID	<20251002230530.31a0f42b__6900.47446857847$1759464452$gmane$org@kf-m2g5>

On Tue, 2 Sep 2025 09:14:14 -0500
Aaron Rainbolt <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Tue, 2 Sep 2025 12:37:52 +0200
> Julian Andres Klode <[email protected]> wrote:

*snip*

> > It would be interesting to see what --solver 3.0 does here as it is
> > _less_ greedy. Basically it goes:  
> 
> Aren't I already using the 3.0 solver? The issue is mostly in Trixie
> and Sid which I *thought* used a different solver than Bookworm
> (especially since it shows the less desirable behavior). I'll pass
> `--solver 3.0` and see what happens. I'll also try David's suggestion
> of passing the packages in a different order (both on the metapackage
> level and with the order of installing metapackages), although I fear
> that getting the order right may be impossible in some non-trivial
> situations.

So, I did a test with `--solver 3.0`, and it *did* change things for
the better - now only mate-polkit is chosen, not ukui-polkit. A whole
lot of other things are also not installed, using `--solver 3.0` didn't
add any additional packages, it only removed packages (and it removed A
LOT of packages - the test shared in the original report resulted in
apt trying to install 315 packages, but when using `--solver 3.0` apt
only tries to install 178 packages).

The full results are more than a bit long, but here's some pastebins:

`apt -s install --no-install-recommends nm-connection-editor
mate-settings-daemon`: https://termbin.com/qzr9

`apt -s install --no-install-recommends --solver 3.0
nm-connection-editor mate-settings-daemon`: https://termbin.com/y6qc

Diff of the output from the above two commands with table-formatted data
removed and the remaining data sorted alphabetically:
https://termbin.com/ke2ud

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