Re: New dpkg overwrite behaviour undesirable
I wrote:
> > 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.
Andrew Howell <andrew@toaster.it.com.au> wrote:
> 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.
Please re-read what I wrote. My whole point was that *even if* we have
fixed all such conflicts, dpkg can still have problems - when upgrading past
the point where it was fixed. We're supposed to (eventually) be offering
easy and smooth upgrade from 0.96R6 to 1.1 - with dpkg the way it is now,
*every* system with manpages installed will fail with these problems on
upgrade.
Warwick
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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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