Package upgrade question
Hi, I have a question about how to handle the upgrade of one of my
packages to a new upstream package.
I am currently the maintainer of the package 'smurf', which is now no
longer maintained upstream. For various reasons, upstream has moved to
a new codebase called 'swami', which more-or-less replaces the
functionality of smurf, but is essentially brand new code. Now that
swami has gotten into testing, I'd like it to completely replace
smurf.
What's the correct approach to doing this? Currently, I have followed
the procedure for renaming a package, as described in Developer's
Reference 5.9.3: I got swami's maintainer to add
Conflicts: smurf
Replaces: smurf
to swami, and filed a bug against ftp.debian.org to remove smurf.
However, one of the ftp masters informed me that this arrangement may
be problematic, because it doesn't provide a smooth upgrade path for
people who are currently using smurf. What is the "correct" way of
doing this, if there is one?
The suggested way is to upload a dummy smurf package that depends on
swami, but since swami already conflicts with smurf, this isn't really
possible anymore. Also, I wonder about the wisdom of doing this,
because swami *is* a brand new program that is different from smurf
even though it provides the same kind of functionality. It seems a bit
awkward to me to have someone run apt-get upgrade, and have smurf
silently removed and replaced by a new program which he may not know
the name of.
Advice?
T
--
Computers shouldn't beep through the keyhole.
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