Caught in the act
Hello to all friendly people reading this ...
I'm pkging new upstream of a quite basic lib (libgii).
Two small (<10k) demos, where at least one is practically usable, this
is, would be nice to have it installed as binary, are to be installed
with the binary pkg.
The previous debian release has them in the libs pkg, which violates
policy (11.3) for good reasons as you'll immediately notice.
Policy also states that (small) runtime utils may be with a small -dev
pkg. This is what i opt for to avoid archive pollution with a lib-utils
pkg for that 2 demos. But remember, i'ld really like to include them.
Upgrading of that pkg is no problem. The old-lib vanishes, the new not
including the utils installs. Same for the -dev, the old one being
replaced with the new which includes the utils.
But downgrading naturally blows. The utils (in new -dev) would have to
be overwritten from the old to be installed lib-pkg.
Fiddling with every available relationship field was instructive but
the best result i could achieve, was that dpkg would refuse to install
at all because of conflicts.
The only other idea, that came to my mind, is to use pre- and postrm
and postinst scripts of the new lib! to rename the installed utils of
the new -dev! in prerm, and remove the renamed versions when the old
lib has properly installed.
I tried this, the scripts do what they should in the right order to the
right time, but dpkg doesn't compare file system but
...dpkg/info/pkg.list. This released me from thinking about, how i
could provoke upgrade-abort but now i'm stuck.
-- Would that be 'legal' anyway? Modifiying installed files of one pkg
by the scripts of another? (They're closely related however and chances
are good that after all this weird stuff, the next pkg to be removed
would be the manipulated -dev anyway).
-- If so, is there a place to find the dpkg base directory. I would
have to rewrite the filelist.
-- If not, what else besides leaving those silly programs out could i
do? Is there a 'use-by date' for old pkgs? Else i can only hope that
upstream bump up its version soon ...
That demo is nice, but such a long post for this ...?
See it as a testcase - i learned a lot already ;-)
greetings, martin
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