Package splitting and upgrades

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

Greetings.

When a package `foo' in potato is split in two for woody, `foo' and `bar',
it is considered acceptable that people upgrading from potato to woody
lose the functionality provided by `bar' and have to read the release
notes to know why? What if there are a lot of splits like this and the
release notes becomes several kilometers long? Is this the type of
quality we want for our users?

I think the only method which is fool-proof (using either apt or dselect)
is to make `foo' to depend on `bar' under woody as a temporary measure,
and drop the dependency in woody+1, but some people consider this a gratuitous
dependency.

Do we need a new dpkg field for this, maybe "Previously-in:", which is
understood by dselect and apt only on upgrades?

I ask this because of a discussion I'm having with the tetex maintainers,
but also because I'm considering doing a split myself (for gettext).

Thanks.