Breaks is going to be implemented

[Ian Jackson <iwj@ubuntu.com>]

At the Ubuntu meeting in France[1] we agreed that we (well, I) will
implement Breaks in dpkg in Ubuntu.  I trust that this meets with
the approval of everyone here.

The full plan for the Ubuntu deployment is here
 https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PackageDependencyFieldBreaks
including references to the semantic specification (which is from
October 1997).

I think a similar plan would apply well to Debian and I'll be feeding
the changes to Debian via the BTS in the usual way.  In particular, I
will do step (1), making dpkg reject packages which say Breaks:,
tomorrow.

Are there any people with extensive outstanding patches to dpkg
including particularly dependency algorithm changes ?  I ask because
the Breaks patch is likely to be quite large and I want to avoid
conflicts.

Ian.

[1] People say the conference was in Paris but actually it was in a
desolate outpost of Airportland vaguely near Charles de Gaulle.