- <varlistentry><term>Immediate-Configure</term>
- <listitem><para>Disable Immediate Configuration; This dangerous option disables some
- of APT's ordering code to cause it to make fewer dpkg calls. Doing
- so may be necessary on some extremely slow single user systems but
- is very dangerous and may cause package install scripts to fail or worse.
- Use at your own risk.</para></listitem>
+ <varlistentry><term><option>Immediate-Configure</option></term>
+ <listitem><para>
+ Defaults to on, which will cause APT to install essential and important
+ packages as soon as possible in an install/upgrade operation, in order
+ to limit the effect of a failing &dpkg; call. If this option is
+ disabled, APT treats an important package in the same way as an extra
+ package: between the unpacking of the package A and its configuration
+ there can be many other unpack or configuration calls for other
+ unrelated packages B, C etc. If these cause the &dpkg; call to fail
+ (e.g. because package B's maintainer scripts generate an error), this
+ results in a system state in which package A is unpacked but
+ unconfigured - so any package depending on A is now no longer
+ guaranteed to work, as its dependency on A is no longer satisfied.
+ </para><para>
+ The immediate configuration marker is also applied in the potentially
+ problematic case of circular dependencies, since a dependency with the
+ immediate flag is equivalent to a Pre-Dependency. In theory this allows
+ APT to recognise a situation in which it is unable to perform immediate
+ configuration, abort, and suggest to the user that the option should be
+ temporarily deactivated in order to allow the operation to proceed.
+ Note the use of the word "theory" here; in the real world this problem
+ has rarely been encountered, in non-stable distribution versions, and
+ was caused by wrong dependencies of the package in question or by a
+ system in an already broken state; so you should not blindly disable
+ this option, as the scenario mentioned above is not the only problem it
+ can help to prevent in the first place.
+ </para><para>
+ Before a big operation like <literal>dist-upgrade</literal> is run
+ with this option disabled you should try to explicitly
+ <literal>install</literal> the package APT is unable to configure
+ immediately; but please make sure you also report your problem to your
+ distribution and to the APT team with the buglink below, so they can
+ work on improving or correcting the upgrade process.
+ </para></listitem>