Re: dpkg: overwriting file from other package fails despite diversion

[gator_ml@yahoo.de]

On 2012-11-20 20:08, Sven Joachim wrote:
> On 2012-11-19 10:17 +0100, gator_ml@yahoo.de wrote:
>> In order to be able to overwrite "foreign" files without triggering a
>> conflict, I install diversions for the files in question. As described
>> in the policy manual
>> (http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ap-pkg-diversions.html)
>> I used ad "preinst" script with something like this:
>>
>>     dpkg-divert --package $our_package --add --rename \
>>         --divert ${dest_name}.org ${dest_name}
>>
>> As intended, the original file versions are renamed before the actual
>> installation. Nevertheless, "dpkg" complains about a conflict and aborts.

After I made a minimal test package (which worked as expected on all
systems i tried) I eventually found the problem:
My package name contained a hyphen ("-"), but in the "preinst" script
I had used an underscore ("_") instead, so the diversion was created
(almost) as intended, only for the wrong package ... ;-)

>> Was there any recent change compared to the policy manual? (I am doing
>> this on wheezy). Did I get something wrong? To my understanding, this is
>> pretty exactly the scenario, that is described in the manual ...
> 
> Also the one used by various Debian packages, so it can be assumed to
> work in general, or there would have been bug reports.

just out of curiosity: do you know any examples for this in wheezy?
I had tried to find some, but all I could come up with were historic -
in contemporary packages the preferred method seems to be via
alternatives ...

Regards,
                Peter