Bug#30852: X packages do not upgrade automatically due to name change.

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

Package: general
Version: today
Severity: important

[ "general" because it affects a lot of packages, and because I would like
to hear some input from debian-devel ].

The day before yesterday I tried to upgrade to slink via dselect+APT. 
Well, *none* of the newer X packages (those who changed the name) were
selected automatically by dselect.

Reason: I had not any package installed which explicitly depend on them,
so all the dependencies were satisfied with the old packages.

I don't think the user should be required to remember (or even to *know*)
how all the X packages (or *any* package) changed their names.

So, if we want the upgrade to be smooth, and we do not want this question

"Why the hell my X packages were not upgraded automatically?"

to become a FAQ, and we do not want a lot of people to lose a lot of time,
I propose to do one of the following things *before* slink release:

1. Change the names back (difficult).
2. Create a complete set of "compatibility" packages (easy).

Example of compatibility package:

Package: xfnt100
Version: 999
Section: oldlibs
Priority: extra
Depends: xfonts-100dpi

This way, if somebody has xfnt100 previously selected, dselect will
automatically select the new package, on which the old (compatibility) one
depends.

[ We already had at least one compatibility package like this in bo.
It was called "miscutils" ].

We could blame dpkg or dselect for not having an extra field to allow a
package to change its name in a transparent way, but until we have support
in dpkg for this kind of things (and certainly this support will not be
added before slink release), compatibility packages are *much* better than
nothing.

Thanks.

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