Re: Transitional (dummy) packages considered silly
2009/9/19 Sven Joachim <svenjoac@gmx.de>:
> On 2009-09-19 21:18 +0200, Pierre Habouzit wrote:
>
>> Note that transitional packages are seamless for users. When users has
>> foo in $stable, and foo gets renamed into bar in $stable +1, then there
>> is that:
>>
>> $stable: package foo
>> $stable + 1: foo Depends bar, bar {replaces foo, provides foo, conflicts foo}
>> $stable + 2: foo is dropped, replaces/provides/conflicts foo in bar can be dropped.
>>
>> After user has upgraded from $stable to $stable + 1, he doesn't have
>> 'foo' anymore.
>>
>> There is one point in having the transitional package: it ensures that
>> no package does try to take "foo" as a package name in $stable + 1 which
>> would then in turn confuse apt.
>>
>> That is the state of the art. Could you please elaborate where and why
>> this field would help ?
>
> It would help frontends to transition the "Automatically installed"
> status from bar to foo. Currently in this situation bar is marked as
> automatic as it's a dependency of foo, and you need to do e.g.
> "aptitude unmarkauto bar; aptitude markauto foo" so that
>
> - removing foo does not accidentally remove bar as well;
> - foo gets away as soon as it's no longer needed.
>
> This should really be done by the package management, not by the user.
It sounds like you are describing the following:
>> $stable: package foo
manually installed
>> $stable + 1: foo Depends bar, bar {replaces foo, provides foo, conflicts foo}
foo should now be marked as removeable, bar should be marked as
manually installed (i.e. take the state associated with foo)
Can any of that be achieved with postinst scripts?
Anton
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Anton Piatek
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