# apt-get install --purge fonts-roboto
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:
 fonts-roboto : Depends: fonts-roboto-hinted but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

The error is incorrect because fonts-roboto-hinted can be installed:

# apt-get install --purge fonts-roboto fonts-roboto-hinted
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
[...]
Recommended packages:
  fonts-roboto-unhinted
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  fonts-roboto-hinted
The following packages will be upgraded:
  fonts-roboto
1 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 227 not upgraded.
Need to get 2,946 kB of archives.
After this operation, 8,056 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian testing/main amd64 fonts-roboto-hinted all 2:0~20151012-1 [2,941 kB]
Get:2 http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian testing/main amd64 fonts-roboto all 2:0~20151012-1 [5,178 B]
[...]

Control: clone -1 -2
Control: reassign -2 fonts-roboto

Well, the package is a bit broken. It depends on fonts-roboto-hinted
and recommends fonts-roboto-unhinted, which conflicts with fonts-roboto-hinted
(and thus fonts-roboto).

The package needs to be fixed to drop the recommends and change
the dependency to fonts-roboto-hinted | fonts-roboto-unhinted.

It does not make sense for APT to install a package where one recommends
conflicts with itself, not sure if we could handle that better, so I'll
clone the bug instead of a direct reassignment.

The error message needs to be at least improved. The conflict appears
nowhere in it.

Also, the fact that "apt-get install --purge fonts-roboto" fails but
not "apt-get install --purge fonts-roboto fonts-roboto-hinted" doesn't
seem to be very consistent.

Julian Andres Klode <jak@debian.org> writes:

Right, there is already a bug¹. The fix is also ready, but uploading is
getting rejected repeatedly by ftpmaster due to some checksum mismatch
which we don't know how to fix :(.

¹ https://bugs.debian.org/808298