Bug#35691: dpkg: New package dependency: "affects"

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

On Wed, 7 Apr 1999, Simon Richter wrote:

> On Wed, 7 Apr 1999, Santiago Vila Doncel wrote:
> 
> > > Package: dpkg
> > > Version: 1.4.0.34
> > > Severity: wishlist
> 
> [new dep field]
> 
> > I think this particular problem would be solved by:
> > 
> > 1. Making /etc/mailcap not to be a conffile but instead generate a
> > default one in the postinst when it does not exist.
> > 
> > 2. Making the generation of the default /etc/mailcap by
> > mime-support.postinst to be done by a new script, mime-support-conf.
> > 
> > 3. Making the install-mime script to call mime-support-conf to create a
> > default /etc/mailcap if it does not exist, before registering any app.
> 
> This does not, however, solve all problems. Assume you are running a
> system without mime-support installed and you would want to install it
> later on. With my approach, dpkg would notice that the other package, e.g.
> lynx, interacts in some way with mime-support, and call lynx.postinst,
> which would register lynx as an HTML viewer. Your approach would not do
> that but ignore lynx because it was installed before mime-support.
> [...]

You are right.

My proposal was just a slight improvement over the current status.


Yet another thing could be done: rewrite the install-mime
mechanism and convert it into something like the menu system.

The menu system does not have this problem, because it "collects"
the menu entries of each package on the background.

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