Re: Depends/Conflicts question

[Steve Greenland <steveg@moregruel.net>]

On 11-May-03, 20:41 (CDT), Sean 'Shaleh' Perry <shalehperry@attbi.com> wrote: 
> anacron recommends cron and having a system without cron is really rather 
> silly.  I do not see anything wrong with depending on cron only.

Well, that's a valid solution, and since I won't be maintaining
checksecurity after this, I won't have to deal with the inevitable bug
reports...

There still some problems, though. If I do this in checksecurity's
control file:

Depends: cron (>= 3.0pl1-74)

and the new checksecurity unpacks before the new cron, then I get 

dpkg: error processing ../checksecurity_1.0.0_all.deb (--install):
 trying to overwrite `/etc/checksecurity.conf', which is also in package
 cron

If I add "Replaces: cron". then it doesn't have this problem, but a new
one emerges: if I have cron -73 on the system, and just try to install
the new checksecurity, it will replace the checksecurity.conf file
before it fails to configure (due to the dependency on cron -74). If I
now purge checksecurity, it deletes the checksecurity.conf file. Oops!

A pre-depends on cron solves that, but seems excessive. 

Also, if I change the conffile from what was shipped in -73, I get a
bogus changed conffile message during the install (well, not really
bogus, because dpkg can't know that it isn't just some random file on
the system, but annoying.) 

Am I just going to have to handle all of this in the maintainer scripts?
How tedious :-(.

Steve
-- 
Steve Greenland
    The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating
    system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the
    world.       -- seen on the net