Re: Upgrade procedure for tetex
'Martin Alonso Soto Jacome wrote:'
>
>Chow Chi-Ming <cmchow@se.cuhk.edu.hk> wrote:
>> It is a good idea, I think. Does anyone know a way to surely purge
>> the old Debian TeX packages?
>
>Removing them in reverse dependency order worked for me, although I had to run a separated dpkg for each removal operation.
>
>However, now I'm thinking of a possible way to replace teTeX using dselect. The idea is to create a set of dummy packages with the same names and newer version numbers than the current Debian TeX packages, but with no files inside (is a totally empty package allowed by dpkg-buildpackage?). teTeX packages would conflict with the current TeX package versions, but not with the dummy ones. That way, dselect would "upgrade" to the dummy packages, thus actually removing the old TeX files in a clean way. The dummy packages would be removed later.
>
>What do you think?
We can do better. If tetex has the "right" Conflicts, Replaces, and
Provides lines, dpkg can automagically replace (most) of the old tex
packages. The exception: dpkg doesn't handle recursive replaces.
I'm not sure the best way to handle the exceptions. I suspect that
using a Replaces and a Provides (no Conflicts) will replace everything
whose filename hasn't changed. Perhaps tetex-base should do a rm -rf
/path/to/old-tex/stuff in the preinst to clear out all the junk.
--
Christopher J. Fearnley | Linux/Internet Consulting
cjf@netaxs.com, cjf@onit.net | UNIX SIG Leader at PACS
http://www.netaxs.com/~cjf | (Philadelphia Area Computer Society)
ftp://ftp.netaxs.com/people/cjf | Design Science Revolutionary
"Dare to be Naive" -- Bucky Fuller | Explorer in Universe
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