Re: What should we do now?
Gregor Hoffleit writes:
> Regarding (2): Making the dependency explicit (by using
> /usr/bin/python1.5) is just playing safe.
>
> As far as I can see, if we hadn't the legacy of the existing packages
> and installations, and if versioned dependencies would work on all
> systems in all situations, we could come up with a quite clean setup:
> python-base et al. could be empty packages (virtual packages wouldn't
> work!), and other packages could depend on them (e.g. "Depends:
> "python-base (>= 2.0), python-gtk" for a package that need at least
> Python 2.0 or better. Still in this case, what could you do if Python
> 2.3 broke that script ?)
>
> But we haven't an ideal situation, so we have to fight with that kind of
> legacy.
>
> But maybe it brings us to the core of the problem:
>
> As far as I can tell our principal problem is that there's a large set
> of existing packages (from slink, potato) that have wrong dependencies
> (like unversioned "Depends: python-base" for packages that depend on
> Python 1.5.2) that would be (erronously) satisfied if we just continued
> to use python-base and so on.
>
> One way to resolve this is to include a huge list of conflicts in
> python-base et al.
>
> Another way to resolve this is to drop these package names, perhaps in
> favour of some other package names.
Asking our apt developer Jason Gunthorpe, he pointed out, that such a
huge list of Conflicts would not work due to limitations in dpkg and
apt. I don't like the second alternative, because it needs interaction
of the package maintainers involved ...
I don't like introducing another new package name either as proposed
by Carey in
http://lists.debian.org/debian-python/2001/debian-python-200110/msg00090.html.
Gregor pointed out that python-base is almost a complete python
package, so we could rename it and "reuse" the name "python",
"python1.5", "python2.1" for the base packages.
So the python-base package would look like
Package: python
Depends: python2.1
Conflicts: python-base, <plus the 10 other packages, which depend on
python, but do not declare a versioned dependency>
Matthias
PS: I'll make me rare on debian-python 'til the weekend (preparing
gcc-3.0 packages ...)
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