New required base packages for Amiga, Atari, ... detection
There are now some packages for m68k that make sense only on a
specific machine type. Currently we have such packages only for Atari,
but others can follow easily. The packages are nvram and setsccserial,
and atari-fdisk is about to be debianized.
Those packages are currently Architecture: m68k, but this alone isn't
sufficient, because it still allows their installation on e.g. an
Amiga, where they don't make sense at all. Currently the preinst
script of such packages makes some tests that the machine really is an
Atari (via /proc files), but this isn't the cleanest solution. It
would be much better if already dependencies could forbid installation
on non-Atari machines (or whatever...).
James Troup had a fine idea for this: We could introduce new required
and essential packages in the base section, like base-atari,
base-amiga, base-mac, and so on. (Those packages won't have any files
in them for now, but maybe we have something to include in them in
future.) Machine-specific packages then can depend on those
base-<mach> packages.
The appropriate base-<mach> package will be included in the base.tgz
of the install disk set for the machine, so it will be installed
automatically for new installations. For existing installations, the
user has to choose the right one... (We could move the /proc based
tests to their preinst, to do it only once.) Of course, the packages
should be Architecture: m68k, they're useless for other architectures
(that don't need distinction between Atari, Amiga, Mac, ...)
All the base-<mach> packages should conflict with each other, so that
only one can be installed. The best way to ensure this would be to
create a new virtual package 'base-machine', that all base-<mach>
packages provide and conflict with.
Since policy says that introduction of essential packages and new
virtual packages requires discussion on debian-devel, I now ask here
if there are any objections to the above.
Roman
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