On ven., 2010-11-19 at 19:23 +0100, David Kalnischkies wrote: > > So, go and start reading. Debian has a lot of dependencies and you have a > lot of possibilities because of that. > You can't use them if you don't know them. > And, more important, you can't blame APT for being stupid if you don't > know what you talk about yourself. Well, I thought that Recommends: and Depends: were different things, which looks to me like a fair assumption. It seems I'm wrong. Oh, and I don't really like your tone, and I'm not usually offended by rudeness. > > By the way, adding a Breaks: xfce4-mcs-manager in xfce4-settings doesn't > > work either, apt will still prefer to hold xfce4-session and keep > > xfce4-mcs-*. > > You have way more information than APT - for example: > Is it communicated that xfce4-mcs-manager and xfce4-mcs-plugin are > now obsolete? No. All which is said is that the new xfce4-session doesn't > work with them (it breaks them). No, xfce4-session depends on xfce4-settings. And xfce4-settings *replaces* xfce4-mcs-*. > So, for APT its clear that we loose two > packages just to get another one upgraded… that doesn't feel right. Even with the Replaces: bit? > > Before you ask, no, debian has no way to say: "this package is > obsolete - > its fine that it will be removed as other packages take care of its > tasks." > The closest thing to that is §7.6.2, but i doubt that this is really > such > a drop-in replacement in your case. > (and that doesn't say anything about an upgrade path, too) Well, it is a replacement, and I don't see such a thing as “drop-in” replacement (and this is not a virtual package). > > So, to solve your problem, you have more or less only one option: > Do not try to clean up behind you, let the package managers do it > (with autoremove or deborphan or whatever). Trying it yourself only > complicates stuff -- and adding Breaks for this kind of stuff is even > against the policy if you want to read it that way: §7.4 Except that in my case, I'm more in the $7.6. I'm not adding Conflicts/Replaces just because I'd like to force people to get rid of xfce4-mcs-*, it's just that it xfce4-settings needs it. They both ship common files (along with xfce4-mcs-plugins) and xfce4-settings replaces the functionality provided by xfce4-mcs-manager. > > Neither Breaks nor Conflicts should be used unless two packages > > cannot be installed at the same time or installing them both causes > > one of them to be broken or unusable. Which is the case here, and why the fields were added in the first place. > > > Or in short: either make empty dummy packages out of them or > just leave them alone. Which would then need to Depends on xfce4-settings in order to provide the same set of functionality, adding complexity to the dependencies. Cheers, -- Yves-Alexis
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