Bug#2828: Horrible aliasing problem (was xosview)
> This is really horrible. dpkg keeps a database of all the files on
> the system, with the filenames stored being the ones found in the .deb
> files.
>
> It has to follow symbolic links when installing, so that you can move
> a filesystem using a symlink without dpkg wiping out the symlink and
> breaking everything.
>
> It can't possibly attempt to do a stat on each filename or anything to
> try to find out which files are unique.
>
> So how is it supposed to detect that two packages (or two versions of
> the same package) have installed the same file by different names ?
>
> I suppose I could just throw up my hands in the air and say "don't do
> that then, dpkg will DTWrongT", but this seems most unsatisfactory.
>
> I can't keep the device and inode numbers of the files in the dpkg
> file lists, because these may change (when a system is repartitioned
> or restored from backup, for example).
But you might be able to keep the inodes of the files you just unpacked
from the .deb file, and compare them just before you remove the
"old" files (/usr/bin/X11/xosview in this case). After each dpkg
run, you'll throw away the inode info.
(I cannot think of any drawbacks of this, but while reading your
email, I had to admire you for forseeing so much problems, that
I hadn't thougth about!)
> Suggestions and/or sympathy welcome.
OK, you have my sympathy, and appologies for posing you with this
tricky problem -- I tried to make xosview conflict with xosview<<1.3.2-2,
(hoping dpkg would remove the old package before installing the new one
in that case), but that doesn't work either.
--
joost witteveen
joost@rulcmc.leidenuniv.nl
joostje@debian.org
--
Use Debian Linux!
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