On Thu, 2005-07-28 at 01:01 +0200, Nicolas Boullis wrote: > > The reason a logical 'X isn't installed' does not > > work is that you could install Y, which depends > > on no X, and then just install X. Now Y is silently > > broken by a package that knows nothing about Y. > > As far as I know, such things already happen with conflicts: let foo > conflict with bar. If you install foo first, everything is fine. Later, > if you install bar, foo is broken by bar, while bar knows nothing about > foo... Where's the difference? Ouch! I see. Being a math type person I tried to see if there were a proper extension. However I didn't go back to consider whether Debian itself was broken. The assumption here is that Conflicts is a symmetric relation: if A conflicts with B, then B conflicts with A. On that assumption, apt is broken and should be fixed the way I suggested: if there is a conflict which not currently true, a no-X package should be created by the package manager to prevent subsequent installation. So it looks like 'no-X' is not simply needed to satisfy an unusal request -- it is needed to repair a fundamental bug in Debian. -- John Skaller <skaller at users dot sourceforge dot net>
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