RFC: some new deb package flag: "upgrade-conflicts"
Maybe this has been discussed before, but the idea just came to me...
Based on that discussion about bogofilter:
Debian wants to provide a clean upgrade path for all packages.
But sometimes this is not possible (because it would require modifying
the users' home directories and such stuff)
Maybe it could be useful to have some kind of "upgrade-conflict" of
packages - these packages shouldn't be upgraded automatically, and
should probably be given the possibility for displaying a debconf note.
It could have been useful for galeon1, too - during it's early stages
(like version 0.1x) upgrades often required that you remove your .galeon
directory. This was "solved" by showing a debconf note when an upgrade
from such a version was detected; but for bogofilter it seems like it
actually does harm (and not just break some alpha version browser...)
if it get's blindly upgraded - a note should be displayed to the
administrator (which then could tell him to make sure all his users know
about the upgrade, and disable stuff like bogofilter during the upgrade)
Having this as an separate package version flag could allow to detect
such problems at early stages. Maybe even allow the packages to be
upgrade in two stages: upgrade the oldstable package to the stable
version (containing upgrade scripts from oldstable) and then on to
unstable (containing only upgrade scripts for current stable).
Like
oldstable foobar Version 0.1
stable foobar Version 1.1
unstable foobar Version 2.1 Upgrade-Conflicts: foobar <= 1.0
This could maybe even allow the making of "upgrade-packages" that
contain the upgrade script for previous versions; so that a package
is replaced by the upgrade-package (which updates the config files) and
then upgraded again to the new package.
Not sure if there are that big upgrade scripts that justify this fuss
though ;) Maybe gnome1->gnome2 upgrade? But these would need to run as
users, so they can't be just deinstalled...
Gruss,
Erich Schubert
--
erich@(mucl.de|debian.org) -- GPG Key ID: 4B3A135C
A man doesn't know what he knows until he knows what he doesn't know.
Liebe ist eine schwere Geisteskrankheit (Platon)
Humor sollte immmer dabeisein, auch bei Problemen.
Reply to: