Re: New dpkg overwrite behaviour undesirable
warwick@cs.mu.OZ.AU writes:
>
> 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?
Well the whole point of that behaviour is so files don't get overwritten.
I agree it would be better if it just warned you about the file and didn't
overwrite it, but continued on with the rest of the files instead of
bombing out. But this shouldn't really be a problem once we have discovered
all the packages that conflict with each other and either got rid of the
conflicting files or added Replaces field to them.
I've already found quite a few conflicts and they've been fixed :)
Andrew
--
Dehydration - 34%, Recollection of previous evening - 2%, embarrassment
factor - 91%. Advise repair schedule:- off line for 36 hours, re-boot
startup disk, and replace head - wow, what a night!
-- Kryten in Red Dwarf `The Last Day'
Andrew Howell andrew@it.com.au
Perth, Western Australia howellaa@cs.curtin.edu.au
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