I wanted to install libreoffice today. To do so, I first tried using apt-get (Version: 0.8.14.1), and it proposes me a solution with the following characteristics:

338 upgraded, 181 newly installed, 81 to remove and 1880 not upgraded.

You can find the full solution, as well as the data to reproduce this upgrade scenario online at the Mancoosi Debian DUDF repository.

I was not satisfied, because I just wanted to upgrade libreoffice, not the whole system!

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Imagine that you want to find out which packages cannot be installed together in your latest and preferred free software distribution... how would you go about it?

One could try and install together all possible combination of packages, but a free software repository contains several tens of thousands packages, and more than one hundred thousand dependencies and conflicts, so this approach might be interesting only if you really dont know how to best use your account on a Google farm, and you don't care about wasting energy.

One could be a bit smarter, have a look at what has been done in the EDOS and Mancoosi european projects, and program a SAT solver to test these combinations of packages without actually installing them.

Or you could take a completely different approach, and come up with a revolutionary new way of looking at free software repositories.

In a few hours, I am taking a plain to Szeged, to attend the 8th ESEC/FSE conferece, where Jerôme Vouillon is going to show how to extract from free software distributions a co-installability kernel which is much more compact, can be visualised easily, and allows by simple visual inspection to answer this kind of questions in a few seconds.

To give you an example, from the main section of the Ubuntu 10.10 alpha 2 distribution, that contains 7277 packages, one can extract a very simple graph, that easily fits in an A4 page, and which shows all co-installability issues.

Looking at the graph, it is easy to spot immediately a problem with the distribution: you can only install ubuntu-desktop with the pulseaudio audio library, and not with the many other options which are available (like alsa): you can check by yourslef in the picture below

If you know Jerôme, you know that there is also some fantastic piece of software around, and you will be eager to try it... don't wait any longer, you can learn more about COINST by just clicking here.

And by the way, Jerôme's COINST tool got the Distinguished Artifact Award, which will presented at the conference.

It happens that the award is sponsored by Microsoft Research, which posted a nice announcement about it, and we can be happy to see Microsoft Research recognising the importance of the research challenges emerging from Free Software.

I wanted to install libreoffice today, on a freshly installed Squeeze/amd64 ... but it turned out to be more interesting than expected.

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I wanted to try the mplayer=2:1.0~rc3++svn20100804-0.1 from the (unofficial) http://www.debian-multimedia.org. Again, I first tried using apt-get (Version: 0.7.25.3), and it proposes me a solution with the following characteristics:

17 upgraded, 21 newly installed, 6 to remove and 648 not upgraded.

You can find the full solution, as well as the data to reproduce this upgrade scenario online at the Mancoosi Debian DUDF repository.

I was not satisfied, because it wanted to remove 6 packages, so I tried aptitude (Version: 0.6.2.1-2), which proposes a solution with these characteristics:

1 packages upgraded, 6 newly installed, 171 to remove and 635 not upgraded.

Here too, you can find the full solution, as well as the data to reproduce this upgrade scenario online at the Mancoosi Debian DUDF repository.

Finally, I resorted to apt-mancoosi (see the Mancoosi software page) which gave me the following solution, which I finally used.

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I wanted to install mew today. To do so, I first tried using apt-get (Version: 0.7.25.3), and it proposes me a solution with the following characteristics:

1 upgraded, 11 newly installed, 4 to remove and 368 not upgraded.

You can find the full solution, as well as the data to reproduce this upgrade scenario online at the Mancoosi Debian DUDF repository.

I was not satisfied, because mew is just a set of emacs files, so I do not see why I should change a lot of other packages just to get them.

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As we have seen in the first post on these issues, upgrading a GNU/Linux machine is not an easy task: this is why Mancoosi is working hard at improving the situation. Here comes another report from the frontline, detailing the epic battle on my machine resulting from the need to install a single new package, akonadi-kde-resource-googledata, to be able to sync my korganizer data with a Google agenda.

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