Re: Bug#593177: Clarify when dependencies of pre-dependencies are satisfied
Russ Allbery wrote:
>>> On Sun, Aug 08, 2010 at 07:27:44PM -0500, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
>>>> Except *new* dependencies of an upgraded pre-depedency may not be
>>>> present. This is part of the philosophy behind pseudo-essential
>>>> packages generally using pre-depends for one release when they
>>>> acquire new dependencies.
[...]
> Isn't this the thing that Steve said he considered to be a bug in dpkg,
> not in Policy? In other words, are we sure that we want to document this,
> particularly since people tend not to know if their packages might be used
> in Pre-Depends?
Hmm. This behavior is very much by design, so it is hard for me to
call it a bug. It makes upgrades much simpler.
Note that it does not affect pre-depends in general. A lot of the
time, pre-depends is just used to avoid unpack conflicts. So this
is about preinst only, which basically means (based on a quick search)
pseudo-essential packages and debconf.
I would like to document it to avoid bugs. I would not mind it
being documented as “arguably a bug in dpkg”, similarly to the
existing note on Replaces.
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