Re: Transitional (dummy) packages considered silly
Pierre Habouzit <madcoder@madism.org> writes:
> On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 11:52:23PM +0200, Magnus Holmgren 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.
Yes, he does. Till he removes it manually currently.
> Finally, I think your proposal doesn't work, because "Supersedes" cannot
> work if two distinct binary packages "Supersedes" the same binary. We
> can obviously ensure this doesn't happen in the _same_ Debian
> distribution. I don't see how we can feasibly ensure it across different
> releases in a sane way (and I know lots of people having deb lines for
> stable, testing and sid in their sources.list).
Why? The frontend would say "Foo is superseeded by multiple packages:
Bar, Baz, Buzz. Which one do you want?". Compare that to apt-get
giving a list of packages providing a virtual package when one tries to
install one.
MfG
Goswin
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