Re: Silently breaking on upgrade
The Wanderer <wanderer@fastmail.fm> writes:
> The e16keyedit package used to depend on (or, rather, recommend) the
> enlightenment package. It now recommends on the e16 package. The
> enlightenment package has been removed from Debian, with the
> justification that it has been replaced by the e16 package.
> The enlightenment package provides /usr/bin/enlightenment. The e16
> package does not provide either a binary or a symlink at this location.
> As a result, if someone who invokes enlightenment from ~/.xinitrc (a not
> uncommon place to invoke the window manager AFAIK) instead of from e.g.
> /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc installs e16 - which they will be prompted to do
> if they attempt to upgrade e16keyedit - they will wind up in a situation
> in which X will fail to launch because the window manager command is not
> found; this is part of what I consider breaking the system. However,
> they will not notice this until the next time they attempt to launch X -
> which, for many people, may be days or weeks or even months later; this
> is part of why I consider the breakage to be silent.
Oh, and e16 conflicts with enlightenment, so it would remove the old
package and the old binary.
Hm, it's unfortunate that e16 conflicts with enlightenment so that people
can't have both installed to do the transition. Does anyone know why
there's a conflict? It sounds like they don't have the same binary name;
did they conflict on other files?
> When I filed a bug report about this behavior, it was closed fairly
> promptly on the grounds that there is not supposed to be a migration
> path from enlightenment to e16.
Well, that's fine, but in that case the Conflicts should really be avoided
if possible so that the user isn't forced to remove the old package.
> The package maintainer for the e16 and enlightenment packages has stated
> in mail to me that he has no plans to change e16 to accommodate an
> upgrade from enlightenment.
I agree with that stance if upstream doesn't provide any upgrade path, but
I think allowing them to be co-installed would be nice. However, I don't
know what might be in the way of doing that.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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