packages that replace files in other packages

["Mark W. Eichin" <eichin@cygnus.com>]

Should packages ever replace files in other packages? This would make
uninstalling the later package more complicated, although I could
imagine a design where preinst renamed foo to foo.old, and postrm
renamed it back.

This would require that the dependencies introduced an ordering to
package install and removal, which as far as I can tell isn't
happenning; in my experimentation, I made a package of pcmcia-2.8.3,
and then another package of my replacement config files (mwenet), and
installed them both -- but mwenet got installed first, even with a
depends: pcmcia, and then pcmcia overwrote the config files. Is this
just a bug in dselect/dpkg, or is that not the way to do things? (I
understand that I'm overloading the intent of dpkg somewhat by using
it for my config files -- I just liked the idea of getting
*everything* under package control, especially because that way I
could upgrade the pcmcia package and automatically upgrade it and
reload the config files...)

Happy New Year...
					_Mark_ <eichin@cygnus.com>
					Cygnus Support, Eastern USA