On Tue, Jan 11, 2005 at 11:15:26AM +1100, Cameron Hutchison wrote: > Once upon a time Steve Langasek said... > > > > There is nothing in the -source package that actually requires (or should > > recommend) the -utils package. A much better fix here is for people to get > > over the fact that dpkg isn't apt. > Apologies for continuing this but having read through the thread I still > dont think I understand the issue with dpkg in this situation. > Is the following scenario the issue here with dpkg? : > foo-modules_1.0 is installed. It is standalone and does not require any > other packages to be installed. > foo-modules_2.0 is built from foo-source. > foo-modules_2.0 depends on foo-utils. > User runs "dpkg -i foo-modules_2.0_arch.deb" > dpkg first removes foo-modules_1.0 > dpkg then check dependencies of foo-modules_2.0 > dpkg complains that foo-utils is not installed and aborts the > installation of foo-modules_2.0 You seem to have left out a step before this: "user is a moron and ran rmmod foo at this point, instead of reading the error message and running apt-get -f install or apt-get install foo-utils". If the dependencies of the foo-modules package are correct, this is the only way to get your system into such a broken state. If they aren't correct, adding the same incorrect dependencies to the -source package is irrelevant. > foo-modules is now in a broken state unable to be used. > Networking depends on foo-modules so it is not possible to install > foo-utils unless it is locally available. > Is this the scenario being argued over? If so, why does dpkg not first > check the dependencies of foo-modules_2.0 before removing > foo-modules_1.0? If not, could someone explain to me (or point me to a > resource) what the issue is? dpkg doesn't do this because this isn't how dpkg works -- people wrote a higher-level tool, apt, to do that. People ignoring error messages from their package manager, breaking their system's network interface, and blaming the Debian maintainer are something of an edge case that isn't worth dealing with. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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