[Pkg-octave-devel] Bug#463039: Bug#463039: why does octave3.0 provide: octave2.9?
On Sun, Feb 03, 2008 at 10:58:03PM +0100, Rafael Laboissiere wrote:
> > In practice, most of the reverse-depends of octave2.9 have versioned
> > dependencies on octave2.9, so most of these will refuse to accept octave3.0
> > as a replacement. And octave3.0 also *conflicts* with octave2.9, so they're
> > not exactly co-installable either. Something looks very wrong here.
> I am revisiting this issue now and need some advice from you. The goal of
> having octave3.0 conflicting/replacing/providing octave2.9 is to ensure that
> users having octave2.9 installed will be upgraded to octave3.0. This is
> correct from the upstream point of view, because the 2.9.* series of Octave
> were considered as pre-releases of Octave 3.0.0 (I know, I know, we should
> have used octave3.0 as the source package name to start with...)
> Now, would just conflicts/replaces achieve that goal?
To the best of my knowledge, none of these configurations achieve that goal.
While there's lore among Debian developers to the effect that
"Conflicts/Replaces" will trigger the package manager to pull in the new
package automatically as a replacement for the obsolete package, I have
never seen this happen in practice with any of the frontends.
The only two configurations that I know to achieve this purpose are:
- create a dummy package under the old package name, which depends on the
new package name
- keep the old package name for the new version of the software
Cheers,
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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