Re: timezone -> timezones (why?)

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

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I'm going to summarize:

I'm worried mainly by the fact that the old timezone has a "conffile"
which could be removed if the user does "dpkg --purge timezone"
after upgrading to hamm. The file /etc/timezone would be lost.

[ I'm *not* worried by the fact that timezone was essential in rex ].

The potential lost of /etc/timezone is a problem, and I think we should
ideally have a general solution for it, not just a solution that works
only when autoup.sh is used.

I first proposed to keep the name of the package, "timezone", untouched.
This would require an epoch, since the last timezone package was 7.55-2.
[ Current source package for this is libc6, and it has 2.0.7 as version
number ].

The only problem with epochs is that they are "ugly", but they do work. 
However, since libc6 and the current timezones package both derive from
the same source package, probably libc6 would also need an epoch. This
would be perhaps the most ugly thing of all: Having a package named libc6,
version 2.0.7, with an epoch value of 1...

BTW: Question for dpkg hackers: Would be possible to have libc6_2.0.7
and timezone_1:2.0.7 generated by the same source package?
[ If not, I withdrawn from my proposal of keeping the name untouched ].

The other solution I proposed is to create a dummy timezone package,
version "99". This package would be completely *empty*, so that purging it
would not remove any conffile at all.

This would be also ugly, but once you upgrade to hamm, this package could
be purged with no risk.

If you propose a third solution (modifying dpkg so that it manages package
name changes smartly), then go ahead, find somebody who implement that in
dpkg in less than one month ;-)

But please, don't tell me "everybody is supposed to use autoup.sh".
Or "there is just *one* upgrade path". Our packaging system is robust
enough to allow an upgrade of packages in a *random* fashion (if we use
the appropriate Dependencies and Pre-Dependencies).

Thanks.

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