[ Please preserve CC's while the lists are down and feel free to add more. ] On IRC we were discussing why there is the requirement that udebs have names different from debs in the archive. I looked back at my mail archives from when this was set up, and could find only one good reason: On 13 Dec 2000 I wrote: > James Troup wrote: > > You can't have a .udeb with the same name as a .deb; this is enforced > > by katie (i.e. the package will be REJECTed) at JoeyH's specific > > request. > BTW my reasoning behind that is it could get confusing if someone > manages to install a udeb onto a full debian system, and then runs into > bugs and we don't realize they are due to the udeb, etc. But there are obviously other ways to guard against that if it is a problem. For example, udebs could depend on broken-system, and then dpkg would be pretty clear about what happens if you install them. :-) Weighing on the other side of this are the problems that we now know having separate names cause: - Calling things di-foo.udeb, foo-udeb.udeb, foo-di.udeb, is inconsistent and ugly. And what if we have a main-menu.udeb now, but later decide we want a main-menu.deb too (this is only partly hypothetical, I need something like it for base-config). - We cannot have a libc6.udeb, so udebs cannot use dpkg-shlibdeps to generate their dependencies, except that most of them still do and we get broken deps in the d-i archive. This has made it hard to make d-i handle library udebs right, I won't go into the whole mess. I think that this naming requirement was a bad idea, and we should open up the archive for debs and udebs with different names. Note that this doesn't entirely solve the library udeb problem, as a udeb that depend on libc6 (>= foo) still violates udeb policy (by having a versioned dependency). But it's a step in the right direction. -- see shy jo
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