Re: Accepted sdl-image1.2 1.2.2-1 (i386 source)
On Tue, Aug 13, 2002 at 08:09:26PM +0900, Junichi Uekawa wrote:
> > $ apt-get install A
> >
> > which in this state leaves you with a non-working program. Same thing
> > for upgrading just libA.
>
> So, package libA should really conflict with every program that was
> previously compiled with it, to minimize confusion.
With every, uhm, *package* that links explicitly against the
non-versioned libpng2. (We can't do much about things that are not
packages, like I said before).
> To achieve that goal, a package rename can happen.
Renaming packages is a pain. A real pain. We can't honestly say that
we have a good way of dealing with that. For libraries we are just
lucky enough, because those beasts are pulled by other packages. apt
tends to get things right, even if it likes to tell you that it will
deinstall half your system in order to upgrade one package *g*.
There's also some ammount of pain in the way from unstable to testing.
Package A depends on B provided by source C. C no longer provides B
but D and the version of A in unstable depends on that. I don't know
if this is still the case, but the testing scripts used to react like
"uh?" to this situation, particularly if A wasn't one package but a
bunch of them.
> I am worried looking at the confusion libgtk rename is causing,
> because people seem to think having a nonworking package
> (libsdl-image1.2/libsdl-perl/frozen-bubble) than conflicting packages
> that cannot be installed at the same time (and probably rightly).
$ apt-get install foo
Hey! I want to remove 400 packages here, should I? [Y/y]
People usually don't like the look of that.
Besides, this kind of renaming creates non-sensical names
(libgtk2.0-0png3) which in the long run create more trouble (from a
user's point of view). I remember Rasterman asking why he had to
install libttf2 in order to get FreeType 1. After explaining it to
him, he expected libXext.so.6 to be in the package called libxext6...
or something along those lines. I'm not actually waiting with
eagerness the moment when I have to tell people to install "lib 'je 'te
'ka two dot 'o dash 'o 'pe 'en 'je three". Hopefully that will never
have to happen since that name will be well hidden behind other
dependencies. Don't get me wrong, they are necessary evil, but I'd try
harder to avoid them (if technically possible). Technically,
libgtk2.0-0 could have been called libgtk2 and there would have been
nothing wrong about that.
--
Marcelo
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