On Wed, Aug 03, 2016 at 06:22:47PM -0500, Nate Bargmann wrote:
> Enabling the backports repository seems to be even worse as aptitude now
> wants to remove all sorts of things. Here is what I get:
>
> $ sudo aptitude install libgtkhtml-4.0-0:i386

[cut]

This is what I got:

root@akela:~# apt-get install libgtkhtml-4.0-0:i386
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:
libgtkhtml-4.0-0:i386 : Depends: libgtkhtml-4.0-common:i386 (= 4.8.5-1) but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
root@akela:~#

but by looking closer into libgtkhtml-4.0-common, it says it is a
package for architecture "all" (maybe you or Florian had already
pointed this out, sorry for that). And in fact, it contains only icons
and .mo files for l10n. So simply there is no such package as
libgtkhtml-4.0-common:i386, or libgtkhtml-4.0-common:amd64, for that
matter.

Google revealed that this seems to be a known issue with multiarch:

https://wiki.debian.org/Multiarch/CrossDependencies

due to the lack of a "Multi-Arch: foreign" line in the control file of
packages like libgtkhtml-4.0-common. Now, this might be a bug of the
original Debian package, since it seems that amprolla is not mangling
with it. Rebuilding the package after having added that line to the
control file should solve the problem.

My2Cents

KatolaZ

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