Dear Ole, Le 14/04/2014 07:38, Ole Streicher a écrit : > So, if you want to keep up-to-date, you should at some point remove > package A and install package B instead. This is what I think is the > use of "replaces". Well "Replaces" alone does not provide this feature. If you want to be sure that people do upgrade (which may not be necessary, given the low pop-con), you need to provide a new version of package A (can be built from the source of package B, is the versioning scheme is correct). This new package A is a dummy package, in section oldlibs, whose unique purpose is to pull B. The dummy package A will stay on the system for a while. Tools like deborphan will be able to prune it. It's possible that aptitude will do it automagically at some point too. If there is a problem with installing new B concurrently with old A, then you need to put the Breaks/Replaces machinery into place. In this case it must be a versioned Breaks, since you actually want the dummy package A to be co-installable with B. With a non-versioned Breaks, A would depend on B, which would conflict with A, rendering A uninstallable, which is forbidden. Note that there is no way to ensure that upgrading A will automatically end-up with B being installed and A being uninstalled. This is certainly what you are looking for, it does not exist in Debian. Now it's your package. I just wanted to be sure that you understand how this all works, but it's your call whether or not to introduce the dummy package. The Breaks/Replaces machinery looks quite unnecessary to me except for the -doc package as you said. I'll upload whatever you decide to do. Some more details: in practice, what Replaces does is, in the two situations: File conflict: Warn dpkg that pkg B may overwrite files in A, which needs to be either removed or upgraded, which the (possibly versioned) Breaks or Conflicts ensures. Without the Replaces, dpkg would complain and stop, which is quite nasty. Install only one MTA: Tell apt that B should win the Conflict over A. This really is scarcely used, I'm almost certain that the MTA example is the reason why this machinery was invented. Kind regards, Thibaut.
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