Charles Plessy wrote: > If we would tolerate conflicts, we would not support the parallel use of some > of our packages, but there would be the benefit that the package dependancy > graph could be parsed to report clusters of mutually-incompatible packages. > Often, these incompatibilities will not correspond to use cases, as there is an > obvious selection pressure upstream to avoid conflicts with other programs that > are directlyqused in combination with the upstream work. Consider a package that contains a node.js script, which is not the primary purpose of the package. So it Recommends, rather than depends on nodejs. (Let's assume it uses #!/usr/bin/env node, and for the sake of example is something root might run, so /usr/sbin could be in PATH.) Using Conflicts makes this script behave very unfortunatly in certian circumstances. If some third package came along and added another node binary, and conflicted with node.js, we would probably call that package RC buggy, as it breaks unrelated software. So, having conflicting packages of this sort makes using Recommends, or even Suggests, a minefield, and should be avoided. -- see shy jo
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