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Could somebody explain how can a syslinux packet both depend on and conflict with syslinux-common:

martin@IBM:~$ dpkg -l syslinux syslinux-common
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                   Description
+++-=========================-=========================-==================================================================
un  syslinux                  <none>                    (no description available)
un  syslinux-common           <none>                    (no description available)
martin@IBM:~$ apt-cache depends syslinux
syslinux
  Depends: libc6
  Depends: syslinux-common
  Suggests: dosfstools
  Suggests: mtools
  Conflicts: syslinux-common
  Replaces: syslinux-common
martin@IBM:~$ 

Or how should one understand the output of apt-cache depends <packagename>?

1 Answer 1

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If you look at the output of apt-cache show syslinux it will probably shed more light:

For brevity, I'm only showing the fields I'm referring to, from the second result (the highest version) to the command above:

Package: syslinux
Version: 2:4.05+dfsg-6+deb7u1
Replaces: syslinux-common
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.7), libuuid1 (>= 2.16), syslinux-common (= 2:4.05+dfsg-6+deb7u1)
Recommends: mtools
Suggests: dosfstools, os-prober
Breaks: syslinux-common (<< 2:4.05+dfsg-6+deb7u1)

As you can see, syslinux 2:4.05+dfsg-6+deb7u1 depends on syslinux-common 2:4.05+dfsg-6+deb7u1, and it breaks any version of syslinux-common less than 2:4.05+dfsg-6+deb7u1.

apt-cache depends is a simple tool, and is almost certainly conflating "conflicts" and "breaks" here, which is how you end up with syslinux both depending on and conflicting with syslinux-common. If apt-cache depends showed version numbers it would be clearer.

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