Re: additional virtual packages for kde

[Ben Pfaff <pfaffben@pilot.msu.edu>]

Enrique Zanardi <ezanardi@noah.dfis.ull.es> writes:
> > However, let me make another suggestion: We add a new control field to our
> > packages, namely `Distributor'. All Debian packages will get
> > 
> >      `Distributor: SPI'
> > 
> > and everyone outside the project should use something else, e.g.
> > 
> >      `Distributor: KDE Project'  (or how they call themselves--I don't
> >                                  know)
> > 
> > Then we could extend dpkg/dselect/deity to check for this field and warn
> > the user if he/she tries to mix such packages. Of course, there should be
> > a way to override these warnings (just when someone tries to override some
> > dependencies).
> 
> That looks like a good proposal. We could define that a foo_A.deb from SPI 
> will always conflict with a foo_B.deb from other parties, no matter the 
> values for A and B.

The problem with this proposal is that there is no assurance that in
fact the conflicting packages will have the same names; i.e., they
might divide up the functionality in KDE into packages differently
from the way that we do it.

Won't our turning off --force-overwrite in 2.0 be a more realistic
solution of this problem?  Aren't most package conflicts really
related to their usage of competing file structures?  Or am I totally
off-base here?
-- 
Ben Pfaff <pfaffben@pilot.msu.edu> <blp@gnu.org> <pfaffben@debian.org>