Re: Processed: your mail

[Wichert Akkerman <wichert@wiggy.net>]

Previously Michael Stone wrote:
> No, the coreutils is the new package doing the replacing. New
> debianutils works fine with that. Old debianutils installed after new
> coreutils screws things up

Right, that is expected behaviour.

> The way I read the rules on replacing, it states that if an older
> version of a package replaced: by another package is installed, the
> conflicting files should be discarded.

I'm not sure where you read that, but that is simply not true. Replaces
is a simple one-way relation where a package declares it will overwrite
files from another package. 

> That doesn't seem to be happening, but all I've heard so far is advice
> to have coreutils conflict with older debianutils (non-workable
> solution, AFAIK, because both coreutils and debianutils are required)
> and that dpkg is doing the right thing (even though it conflicts with
> the documented behavior for replaces, AIUI.)

There are two approaches:

* Conflict with older versions of debianutils
* (Pre-)Depend on recent versions of debianutils

In both situations you will have a window during which readlink will not
be available. You can make it smaller by introducing a circular
dependency, or make it non-existing by shipping readlink in both
packages until after the next release and using Replaces in both
packages.

Wichert.

-- 
Wichert Akkerman <wichert@wiggy.net>           http://www.wiggy.net/
A random hacker