Bug#438492: Policies copyright rule doesn't fit empty transitional packages
Goswin Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de> writes:
> This does not work well with transitional packages that are completly
> empty. The idea is that dpkg will automatically forget about the
> transitional package after upgrade allowing for example to rename a
> package without leaving a dummy package under the old name
> installed. For this to work the transitional package may have not files,
> not even /usr/share/doc/package/copyright.
Does this actually work? To what degree does dpkg forget about the
package? Do the front-ends such as aptitude and apt-get also forget about
it? This doesn't seem to be how the project is using transitional
packages right now, and this is the first that I've heard of it. Are
there any transitional packages in the archive right now that follow this
model?
It's certainly not an unreasonable idea, but we have to be careful about
breaking invariants like "every package has a copyright file." There can
be unintended consequences.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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