Re: the Great X Reorganization, package splits, and renaming

[Steve Greenland <stevegr@debian.org>]

On 23-Jan-99, 21:21 (CST), Branden Robinson <branden@ecn.purdue.edu> wrote: 
> > 2. Assuming the user does nothing mess with those, they would eventually
> > be shown a Conflict Resolution screen that would show the new xfont-*
> > packages selected and the xfnt-* packages deselected. User should just
> > hit return to accept the change. This should be fairly obvious, because
> > the "explanation" for the xfonts-* packages would be "Replaces xfnt-*".
> 
> Won't this happen anyway?  

No. Because nothing will ever cause the xfonts-* packages to be brought
in, until something updates its dependency from xfnt-* to xfonts-*.
That's the issue: unless the user realizes that zie needs to do
something, the old xfnt packages will be on the user's system, and the
new xfonts packages will be ignored. Yeah, xfree-common (or something)
might recommend some combination of the xfonts packages, but there will
always be leftovers. You could also Recommend all the font packages,
but that would seriously annoy many people, including me, because of
dselect's whining.

I guess the question is "How important is automating this upgrade?" My
personal belief is "not very", because there is really no functional
effect, and the vast majority of people will figure it out pretty
quickly. But it would be nice.

> This is the bone of contention.  Whether or not
> version 1 or 100 of xfntbase is installed, for instance, xfonts-base is
> going to conflict with it anyway.  With the fake packages we get the
> bizarre situation of a package A depending on package B, while package B
> conflicts with package A.

It is kind of bizarre. But it has the desired effect on the user's
system: it leads them to move from xfnt-* to xfonts-*.

> > [consider a postinst kludge to bring in the xfonts-* over the
> > xfnt-*] 
> 
> I greatly fear doing anything like that.  The X reorg has already shown me
> that dpkg is a pretty delicate beast.  I've filed a few bugs against it as
> a direct result of issues raised by the reorg.

Yeah, I agree. That's why I think the dummy package thing is ok. The
only real downside is that you continue to have these xfnt-* packages in
distribution for slink, and probably potato. Put 'em at priority extra,
and make sure the first line of the description begins with "Obsolete:",
and the remaining (short!) description says something like "Do not
install this package; install xfonts-xxx instead. This package exists
only to enable a smooth upgrade from previous Debian releases."

Steve