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Re: predepends on libc6?



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On Fri, 21 Nov 1997, Bdale Garbee wrote:

> In bug report 15091, Christian Meder suggests to me that I make gzip predepend
> on libc6.  It is not clear to me that this is a good thing to do.

[ I think it is a good thing to do, so I have changed the severity to
"grave" ].
 
> What is the process by which we expect current Debian 1.3.1 users to upgrade
> to Debian 2.0?  I used the libc5->libc6 mini-Howto when I upgraded my 
> systems, and all went very smoothly.  Do we expect to suggest our users go
> through a similarly manual process as part of the upgrade, or can we make it
> all work without manual intervention?

We "should" be able to do all work without manual intervention. To this
end, we should of course fine-tune all our Dependencies and
Pre-Dependencies to avoid system crashes or failures. That's why our
wonderful .deb format was created.
 
> I'd be pleased to do whatever is necessary in my packages (particularly
> the essential ones like gzip) to make this transition as smooth as possible,
> but I don't have a good sense of where we are with all this, and don't want
> to do anything rash.

Packaging manual says:

          Pre-Depends should be used sparingly, preferably only by
          packages whose premature upgrade or installation would hamper
          the ability of the system to continue with any upgrade that
          might be in progress.

In our case, "premature upgrade or installation of gzip would hamper the
ability of the system to continue with any upgrade that might be in
progress", because currently you can upgrade to libc6 and libc6-gzip in
such way that gzip is installed *before* libc6 get configured, and gzip
is used by dpkg itself to install other packages.

I am now surprised that the manual does not explicitly says that, in
general, all essential packages should have a Pre-Depends line, but at
least it suggest that all packages "essential to the packaging system"
should do.

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