Re: intent to rename vips7.10 -> vips
On Tue, 18 Jan 2005, Anthony Towns wrote:
> Santiago Vila wrote:
> > The point is not about "needing" dummy packages or not.
>
> Well, yes it is -- they're not there for their own sake, they're there
> to ensure upgrades happen smoothly and automatically. If they're not
> *necessary* for that, they're not useful -- any other way of achieving
> it is better.
Will be better when the other way exists, but this is not the case now.
So, until then, dummy packages are currently necessary.
> > The point is whether dummy packages are useful, and yes, they are
> > useful indeed. Unless things have changed recently, dselect does
> > *not* select a new package to be installed, no matter how many
> > Conflicts:/Provides:/Replaces: on the old package it has.
>
> We really need to get dpkg/apt and dselect/aptitude working as designed.
> Not supporting auto-selecting packages like this, in spite of it
> having been documented for years, is just embarassing.
I agree, but I'm not sure that conflicts/replaces/provides is an
elegant way of telling the package manager "this package is what
this other package used to be".
> > So yes, we *need* dummy packages for upgrades to be smooth.
>
> Although given the -tools and -dev packages have already been renamed
> from libvips7.8-tools to libvips7.10-tools without bothering with dummy
> packages, there's not much point starting now.
It all depends on whether how much supported we want upgrades to be.
If we just want upgrades from woody to sarge to work, dummy packages
are not required in this case, as the packages didn't exist in woody,
I agree.
But if we want to support upgrades from the unstable of yesterday to
the unstable of today, then yes, they are.
I really don't understand what you have against dummy packages. Even
in your position of release manager or ftp-master, they rarely needs
more work for you, as they reuse the namespace already in use by their
non-dummy counterparts (so typically no edition of the override file
is required for them), so why all the fuss about dummy packages?
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