Re: What is the use case for Policy §7.6.2 ?
Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org> writes:
> the Debian policy makes a special case of the
> Provides/Conflicts/Replaces combination, allowing to replace a package
> by another.
> The document mentions the case of a virtual package, for which this is
> nice and all, but it is still allowed for other packages.
> However, any versioned dependency is broken when you handle upgrades
> this way. Even worse, APT does not handle such situations very well. Bug
> #691160 is a good example of what happens in a bad case (the old package
> not being installable anymore). Arguably this is a bug in APT, but we
> are more prone to such bugs by allowing arcane relationships between
> packages.
> It looks to me that we should strictly favor the transitional package
> approach instead. Shouldn’t we entirely forbid the
> Provides/Conflicts/Replaces combination way of handling upgrades, except
> for virtual packages?
That makes sense to me on first glance. I can't think of a case where I'd
want to use Provides/Conflicts/Replaces with non-virtual packages rather
than using a transitional package.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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