Possible dependency bug with sparky-grub-theme

[klappnase]

Hello,
I am not sure if this is the right place to report this (apologies if it is not), but I figured that reportbug is probably debian-only and could not find something else.
I think I encountered a bug in the dependencies of the current version 0.1.3 of the sparky-grub-theme package.
This occured on a cheap laptop of mine, one of those strange devices that are 64bit but with a 32bit UEFI.
I have the 64bit version of sparky installed and to be able to boot this machine I manually installed grub-efi-ia32 and grub-efi-ia32-bin.
Now the upgrade to sparky-grub-theme wants to remove grub-efi-ia32 and install grub-pc instead, which is obviously no good with that device:

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# apt-get -s dist-upgrade
(...)
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  grub-efi-ia32
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  grub-pc grub-pc-bin (...)
Apparently this happens because of the new dependencies in sparky-grub-theme, as the output of apt-cache showpkg reveals (still 0.1.1 installed here):

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# apt-cache showpkg sparky-grub-theme
(...)
Dependencies:
0.1.3 - sparky-artwork (0 (null)) grub-pc (16 (null)) grub-efi (0 (null))
0.1.1 - sparky-artwork (0 (null))
Installing grub-efi instead of grub-pc unfortunately is no option here either, because this would install the amd64 version of grub-efi, which no doubt is also no good with that machine.
Not sure how this could be resolved properly, maybe adding "grub-efi-ia32 | grub-efi-amd64" instead of the grub-efi meta-package as alternatives to grub-pc in sparky-grub-theme's dependencies could help.
It is certainly not a big issue, it looks like I can simply put sparky-grub-theme on hold to avoid this trouble, on the other hand it seems rather serious, since users who install their upgrades incautiously on such a device might probably end up with an unbootable machine.

Best regards

Michael

[pavroo]

Hi Michael
Usually bugs could be reported to our account at sourceforge, but never mind.

Anyway, it is not a bug.
The 'sparky-grub-theme' has only 'sparky-artwork' as a dependency, rest of them is recommended only.
So, using Sparky's "Upgrade System" tool lets you avoid such problems.

Doing upgrade manually, simply run:

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apt update
apt full-upgrade --no-install-recommends

[klappnase]

Hi pavroo,
thanks for the quick response!

Usually bugs could be reported to our account at sourceforge, but never mind.

Thanks, I will keep this in mind in case anything else shows up :)

The 'sparky-grub-theme' has only 'sparky-artwork' as a dependency, rest of them is recommended only.

Oh, you are right (of course), I had overlooked this.

So, using Sparky's "Upgrade System" tool lets you avoid such problems.

Ah ok, I didn't know that, in fact I do not use aptus, but just do "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade".
Now I changed the setting of APT::Install-Recommends to "0" in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/ and the problem disappeared.

However, I still feel that it is odd that with default settings for apt simply doing "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade" will try
to remove a probably vital package as grub-efi-ia32 (although I admit that I am not really sure that this will render the system unbootable,
since grub-efi-ia32-bin apparently would not have been removed, but I was too lazy to try it out).
Stopping apt from installing the Recommends rather feels like a workaround, although admittedly a much better one
than putting the package on hold as I did first :)

But anyway, please don't misunderstand me, I don't want to be nitpicking, just thinking out aloud :)
Sparky is a very nice distro, I really like it, thanks for all the time and work you invest!

Best regards

Michael