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Re: foomatic-db{,-xml} rename in Ubuntu



On Sat, Jul 30, 2011 at 06:08:42PM +0200, Till Kamppeter wrote:
> Sorry, I did not know that a package rename is such complicated in
> Debian, in Ubuntu it is processed very quickly.

Renaming a package in Ubuntu without doing so in Debian first and/or
even contacting the maintainer is extremely counterproductive, not
to mention rude.

The time taken to rename a package is *irrelevant*.  It typically takes
only a few days, but we need to live with the *consequences* for
*years*.  If the package name in Ubuntu is different, then the
package dependencies will also necessarily have to be different.
This is a **gratuitous incompatibility**, which will require any
package present in both Debian and Ubuntu to use the correct package
name in each, or use an alternative dependency on both.  This makes
more work for package maintainers, as well as imposing an ongoing
maintenance burden for no good reason, and additionally making things
more fragile.

If you do need to legitimately rename the package, you should firstly
discuss it with your Debian upstream, get the change made in Debian,
and only then make the change in Ubuntu.  This keeps the package
dependencies sane, and does not unfairly impose maintenance overhead on
others.

> Also I did not know
> that there is a Build-Conflicts concept. This is a great thing for
> such a situation.

We have had Build-Conflicts for as long as we have had Build-Depends...
They are documented together in Policy.


Thanks for your consideration,
Roger

-- 
  .''`.  Roger Leigh
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