Re: Where's /bin/kill ?

[Raul Miller <moth@debian.org>]

On Wed, Nov 10, 1999 at 08:20:48PM +0800, Steven Wong wrote:
> Did you, by any chance, do a dpkg -i --force-overwrite over the past few
> months? I remember some other package other then bsdutils was also providing
> /bin/kill a few months ago. I think it was bash. Anyway, a new release soon 
> followed which excluded that file (in order to fix the file conflict)... 
> 
> When dpkg installed that new package, it deleted the old, bugged one first
> (which included /bin/kill since that package listed it as one of the files it
> "owned"). The newer package was then installed. But this one didn't provide 
> /bin/kill (since that file actually belonged to another package so the
> maintainer left it out in the new release).

It used to be that when dpkg installed a file with --force-overwrite
it wouldn't delete the file till both packages which provided the file
were removed.

It looks like this behavior has been changed, and it looks like that
change was a change for the worse.  [At least the old behavior did the
right thing for the case where both packages provided an identical --
or at least equivalent -- file.]

But before filing a bug report I'd like to know: who changed this
behavior, and why?

-- 
Raul