Re: mass RC bug filing: data splitting
On Fri, Mar 12, 2004 at 02:20:19AM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> The fact that Replaces doesn't work properly when you try to reinstall
> the package with replaced files is a bug in dpkg, which should simply be
> fixed. Replaces and Conflicts is already explicitly reserved by Debian
> policy to mean something different, namely the total replacement of the
> other package, and is already used by dpkg for this purpose: it's on the
> code path that prints "dpkg: considering removing %s in favour of %s" if
> you want to look for it yourself.
>
> Excessive use of Conflicts also makes upgrade ordering more difficult
> for the packaging tools, and leads to subtle upgrade problems that few
> people anticipate. Been there, debugged that.
Oh, furthermore, your proposal is almost equivalent to abolishing
Replaces for all but its meaning in conjunction with Conflicts of
"package A completely replaces package B". As policy says, Replaces only
takes effect when the two packages are present on the system (at least
half-installed) at the same time; but Conflicts guarantees that the two
packages cannot be at least half-installed simultaneously!
(I think there might be a corner case with configuration files, but
that's not what's under discussion here.)
It's clear to me that a corner-case problem with file replacements
should be fixed by fixing the package manager to handle them properly,
not by "fixing" hundreds of packages to abolish the use of the feature.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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