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Re: Replacing an essential package



Jonathan Nieder wrote:
> Please do not CC the APT team on follow-ups --- it looks like APT
> already does the right thing here (sorry for the noise!).
> 
> I wrote:
> 
>> The xz-utils package in experimental Conflicts/Replaces/Provides the
>> pseudo-essential package lzma. I think this should be fine, since
>> installing it only involves overwriting the lzma package rather than
>> removing it.
> [...]
>> Am I misunderstanding policy here?
> 
> I was. Using Conflicts disallows files from xz-utils and lzma from
> coexisting even during an upgrade, making an upgrade impossible.
> 
> What I meant to achieve is accomplished with Replaces/Provides without
> the Conflicts. Once xz-utils has written over all the files of lzma,
> lzma would be marked as uninstalled, so normally the two packages
> would not be installed at once.
> 
> But how to ensure all the files of lzma are overwritten, when newer
> versions could always add more files? I worry because it might be
> confusing to a system administrator to see the lzma package installed
> when most of its important files are provided by another package. Such
> an administrator might blame bugs in xz-utils on the lzma package.
> 
> Advice?
Seems slightly ugly, but 'Breaks: lzma' may help.

-- 
Eugene V. Lyubimkin aka JackYF, JID: jackyf.devel(maildog)gmail.com
C++/Perl developer, Debian Maintainer

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