Re: Getting rid of circular dependencies, stage 5

[Ian Jackson <ian@davenant.greenend.org.uk>]

Manoj Srivastava writes ("Re: Getting rid of circular dependencies, stage 5"):
>         I see you have not fully followed through on reading policy
>  here:     [quote]

Quite.

>         Clearly, dpkg authors have read all of policy, including the
>  caveats about circular dependencies.

This is particularly amusing given that that part of policy was
(a) written by the dpkg authors (ie, me) and (b) was written as
documentation for the actual behaviour (which was and is believed to
be correct).

Actually, there is room for improvement in the documentation here
since it fails to mention that the cycle-breaker in dpkg looks to see
which packages have postinst scripts so as to minimise the disruption
due to disregarding one of the dependencies.  I have just filed a bug
about this :-).

Ian.