Detecting more undeclared conflicts (was: Re: Bug#758234: Raising priority of Debian packages)

[Johannes Schauer <j.schauer@email.de>]

Hi,

Quoting Paul Wise (2014-09-07 11:38:27)
> On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 3:35 AM, Jakub Wilk wrote:
> 
> > We should probably also monitor package conflicts. We made a big fuss about
> > node vs nodejs (and rightly so); but I bet that we have lots of other
> > package pairs in the archive that can't be co-installed for no good reason.
> 
> We have this already:
> 
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=edos-file-overwrite;users=treinen@debian.org
> https://qa.debian.org/dose/file-overwrites.html

would it make sense to extend this test and not only check whether packages
that share a file listed in Contents.gz can be co-installed but also packages
which access/change/create the same files in their pre/post-install maintainer
scripts do?

Is the information about which files are touched in any way by maintainer
scripts generated already somewhere? I think piuparts only takes two snapshots
before installation and after removal but not one in the middle and neither
runs a file system access tracer for all other changes to the filesystem?

If this could be useful, then I could run some tests locally, using fatrace
similar to how I used it to detect unneeded build dependencies.

Does this make sense?

cheers, josch