I have the following ghostscript-related packages installed:
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name Version Architecture Description
+++-===================-==============-============-===================================================================
ii ghostscript 10.01.2~dfsg-1 amd64 interpreter for the PostScript language and for PDF
ii ghostscript-doc 10.01.2~dfsg-1 all interpreter for the PostScript language and for PDF - Documentation
ii ghostscript-x:amd64 10.01.2~dfsg-1 amd64 transitional package for ghostscript
ii libgs-common 10.01.2~dfsg-1 all interpreter for the PostScript language and for PDF - ICC profiles
ii libgs10:amd64 10.01.2~dfsg-1 amd64 interpreter for the PostScript language and for PDF - Library
ii libgs10-common 10.01.2~dfsg-1 all interpreter for the PostScript language and for PDF - common files
Version 10.02.0~dfsg-1 is available, but if I try '+' over "ghostscript"
in the aptitude TUI to ask for an upgrade of this package, I get:
iu ghostscript 10.01.2~dfsg-1 10.02.0~dfsg-1
[...]
ghostscript (upgrade, 10.01.2~dfsg-1 -> 10.02.0~dfsg-1) will be upgraded from ▒
version 10.01.2~dfsg-1 to version 10.02.0~dfsg-1. ▒
▒
The following packages depend on version 10.01.2~dfsg-1 of ghostscript, and ▒
will be broken if it is upgraded. ▒
▒
* ghostscript-x (held/unchanged, 10.01.2~dfsg-1) depends on ghostscript (= ▒
10.01.2~dfsg-1) (provided by ghostscript:i386 10.01.2~dfsg-1) ▒
though ghostscript:i386 isn't installed; so, this doesn't make sense.
Since ghostscript-x is now provided by ghostscript, aptitude should
have proposed to remove this package as it would still be there as a
virtual package.
Package: ghostscript
Version: 10.02.0~dfsg-1
Installed-Size: 180
Maintainer: Debian QA Group <packages@qa.debian.org>
Architecture: amd64
Provides: ghostscript-x (= 10.02.0~dfsg-1), postscript-viewer
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
and in the ghostscript changelog:
ghostscript (10.02.0~dfsg-1) unstable; urgency=medium
[...]
* drop obsolete binary packages ghostscript-x libgs9-common;
have binary package ghostscript provide ghostscript-x
Note that I have:
Aptitude::ProblemResolver::SolutionCost "safety, removals";
And from the command line:
# aptitude install ghostscript
The following packages will be upgraded:
ghostscript ghostscript-doc libgs-common libgs10 libgs10-common
5 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 59 not upgraded.
Need to get 14.8 MB of archives. After unpacking 335 kB will be freed.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
ghostscript-x : Depends: ghostscript (= 10.01.2~dfsg-1) but 10.02.0~dfsg-1 is to be installed
The following actions will resolve these dependencies:
Keep the following packages at their current version:
1) ghostscript [10.01.2~dfsg-1 (now, testing)]
2) libgs10 [10.01.2~dfsg-1 (now, testing)]
3) libgs10-common [10.01.2~dfsg-1 (now, testing, unstable)]
Accept this solution? [Y/n/q/?] n
The following actions will resolve these dependencies:
Remove the following packages:
1) ghostscript-x [10.01.2~dfsg-1 (now, testing, unstable)]
Note that this solution would be OK only because ghostscript-x will
become a virtual package, but aptitude doesn't give this information,
so that this is misleading.