Re: binary-alpha and binary-sparc directories

[Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk>]

(Gigantic crosspost trimmed.)

Raul Miller writes ("Re: binary-alpha and binary-sparc directories"):
> It does look like dvips was superceeded by some other package, and
> that it did originally have some executables in it.  [All I have on my
> system from dvips is a copyright statement and some .tex
> files].  makeidx, metafont and xdvi also seem to be mere stubs of
> packages on my system.

dvipsk should have a Conflicts line to ensure that dselect/dpkg will
remove dvips.

> /usr/bin/fort77 is a perl script, the only other things I see in this
> package are a man page and a copyright statement.  Since I have f2c on
> my system as a separate package, I'd guess that fort77 has also been
> superceeded...

Again, a Conflicts line would have done the right thing.

> I think this is a bug in the debian packaging mechanisms.

Well, I could change dpkg so that it would barf in this situation,
rather than going ahead and removing the files from the earlier
package, but I think that would have been less helpful.

Ian.