Re: renaming a library package (advice and sanity check)
Santiago Vila wrote:
> On Fri, 14 Jan 2005, Jay Berkenbilt wrote:
>
>> I've read Section 5.9.3 of the developer's reference and understand it
>> clearly. Is that still the best way to go?
>
> Not always, unfortunately. Very often, the upgrade will be smoother if
> you use empty dummy packages wisely. It's a pity that developer's
> reference does not mention dummy packages.
Actually it does mention them (calling them "transition packages") in
section 6.7.7. It's too bad section 5.9.3 doesn't cross-reference it.
> For example, you can create a dummy (empty) libvips7.10-doc which
> depends on libvips-doc and has section: oldlibs. Then libvips-doc does
> not need to conflict with every version of libvips7.10-doc, only with
> the non-dummy versions.
To Jay: This is good advice and I second it. To assure smooth upgrades,
remember to have libvips-doc Replace the non-dummy versions of
libvips7.10-doc as well as Conflicting against them. Good luck with
having the section changed from doc to oldlibs in the override file; I
had great difficulty getting this to happen when converting some binary
packages of Cernlib to dummy packages.
> This way, "apt-get upgrade" will install libvips-doc without requiring
> "apt-get dist-upgrade", and this will be done automatically and
> without user intervention,
Are you certain of that? My understanding is that apt-get upgrade will
neither remove current packages nor install new ones, only upgrade
packages that can otherwise be upgraded. So "apt-get upgrade" will just
output something like "libvips7.10-doc is being held back" -- it will
not upgrade libvips7.10-doc to the dummy package nor will it install the
new libvips-doc package. "apt-get dist-upgrade" would still be required
for that.
Unless "apt-get upgrade" has special handling for dummy packages that
I'm not aware of?
regards,
--
Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@princeton.edu> Physics Department
WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University
GPG public key ID: 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544
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