Making the libc5-libc6 upgrade to be safe (was: netstd...)
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[ This was: Bug#13849: netstd should predepend on libreadlineg2 ]
[ I would like to appeal to the technical comittee here. Unfortunately the
technical comittee does not exist yet and all we have so far is
debian-devel. Therefore we will have to discuss it here again ].
Summary: In a bo system, I managed to upgrade netstd without installing
libreadlineg2 first and the simple ftp client stopped working. This is a
really bad situation I really do not desire to anybody.
This should not have happened if netstd would have a Pre-Depends line on
libreadlineg2 (and libc6 & ncurses also, probably).
* On a system which is remotely administered, if for any reason the usual
installing method fails (dselect and libnet-perl and such), it is very
important to have an alternate method to fix the problem (as usual in
Unix, you may do things in several ways).
* The Murphy's law says that if dselect/libnet-perl is the *only*
method that is always guaranteed to work and because of that we decide
that no Pre-Depends is needed for netstd, then it is 100% sure that a lot
of users (it happened to me!) will find that dselect/libnet-perl fails and
will not find an alternate method to fix the problem. Probably the system
is also 100Km away from where you are.
* The total set of Pre-Depends targets is small (most Pre-Depends
are on libc6, ncurses3.4). bash already Pre-Depends on libreadlineg2.
Adding one more Pre-Depends on libreadlineg2 for netstd would not make
a great harm. Not adding a Pre-Depends on libreadlineg2 *could*
actually make a great harm.
* netstd is not essential, not even required, but for people that really
have netstd installed, netstd is *very* important.
In short I think that the addition of this simple Pre-Depends field
will make the libc5 to lib6 upgrade *much* more robust.
Perhaps people doing the upgrade by using the mini-howto or autoup.sh will
not notice it (no harm with these extra Pre-Depends), but people doing the
upgrade by using dselect will certainly notice it (possible harm, which we
can avoid, and therefore should avoid).
So I repeat the question I formulated one month ago:
Please, tell me how much harm does to add a Pre-Depends field on libc6,
ncurses3.4 and libreadlineg2 for netstd. I can tell you how much
inconvenience does *not* to add it and then we can make a comparison
between those two inconveniences.
Thanks.
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