Bug#2828: Horrible aliasing problem (was xosview)

[Raul Miller <rdm@tad.micro.umn.edu>]

Ian Jackson:
 > This is an interesting solution, but it doesn't work well if the
 > sysadmin moves a filesystem without telling dpkg, and dpkg wouldn't
 > know to check and the sysadmin wouldn't expect to have to tell it.
 >
 > I could just refuse to cope with aliasing between different packages.

I think a best effort to do the right thing is a better policy.  Of
course, coping isn't always the right thing...

Perhaps a better idea is to treat this case as an error condition (or
at least a warning condition) and let the package maintainers sort it
out?  [This assumes that there's a reasonable thing to do for this
class of problems.  I suspect we'll see it again as debian migrates
with new software releases.]

Aside: a real problem here is that we don't have a concise set of
guidelines for the sysadmin on a debian system.  A properly written
set of guidelines would warn the sysadmin where to tread carefully and
would have a summary of dpkg's file management semantics for different
classes of files.

--
Raul