Re: Renaming a package

[Daniel Kobras <kobras@debian.org>]

On Thu, Jun 01, 2006 at 01:06:20PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 01, 2006 at 01:39:30PM +0200, Daniel Kobras wrote:
> > Method B
> 
> >   Package: oldpkg
> >   Depends: newpkg
> >   Files:
> >     /usr/share/doc/oldpkg -> /usr/share/doc/newpkg
> >     (and nothing else)
> 
> >   Package: newpkg
> >   Replaces: oldpkg
> >   Provides: oldpkg
> >   Files:
> >     (...)
> >     /usr/share/doc/oldpkg -> /usr/share/doc/newpkg
> 
> > Method A relies on the user or external programs like deborphan to clean
> > up the dummy package. Method B gets rid of it automatically, using a
> > dpkg feature, but requires an extra symlink in newpkg.
> 
> Oooh, Method B is one I haven't seen proposed before in the context of dummy
> packages.  That looks far more elegant to me than the alternatives.  Have
> you tested that dpkg really does do the right thing here, given that the
> replacing package gets installed first (since it's a dependency)?

I did that once in 2003 for dx but hit a different bug then: dpkg would
try to configure oldpkg when it had disappeared already. It worked fine
with a patch to dpkg that went into the sarge version, but I haven't
tested it since then. I'll give it another try to be sure.

Regards,

Daniel.