New dpkg overwrite behaviour undesirable
I apologise if this topic has been covered adequately already - if it has I
missed it (I tried looking in the mailing list archives, but they seemed to
be three weeks behind).
I've just been using dpkg-1.1.3's dselect to upgrade to an ELF system. With
some wrestling, it seems to have been successful (I haven't tried rebooting
yet though ;-). One of the main problems I had with the upgrade is with
dpkg checking for one package overwriting another's files. This in itself
is not a problem, it's the way it's treated as an error, not just a
warning. The problem is that just because you're upgrading to packages
where the problem is fixed, doesn't mean the upgrade's going to work
successfully, as evidenced by my experiences.
To take a concrete example, consider the manpages package. It used to have
manpages that were also included in other packages (and as far as I can tell
still does - exports.5 seems to be in manpages-1.9-4 as well as
netstd-2.02-1 - I'll file a bug report as soon as I'm sure I've got it
right). Now, when I was upgrading, I had an old version of manpages
installed. I did a mass upgrade of all my packages to ELF - but, for
instance, mount was upgraded before manpages, which meant mount broke
because of the conflict. Dpkg had no way of knowing that such a problem
might exist, and that manpages ought to have been updated before mount was -
and I don't think it should have to know this, or needs to know this. I
think in such situations, installation really should proceed despite the
conflict - otherwise people are going to continue to be hit over the head by
this for a long time to come.
Comments?
Warwick
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Warwick Harvey email: warwick@cs.mu.OZ.AU
Department of Computer Science phone: +61-3-9287-9171
University of Melbourne fax: +61-3-9348-1184
Parkville, Victoria, AUSTRALIA 3052 web: http://www.cs.mu.OZ.AU/~warwick
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