* Emilio Pozuelo Monfort <pochu@debian.org>, 2010-06-06, 00:41:
Since the Debian Policy forbids packages that don't provide the same functionality (like these two modules) to conflict with each other, you cannot go that route.
Strictly speaking, policy you referred to (10.1) applies only to conflicting binaries. I agree however, that we should extrapolate this rule to other types of name conflicts (even non-filesystem ones). That is, I consider unacceptable for two unrelated packages to use "Conflicts" just because their upstream have chosen the same name for Python module.
You could probably hack it with .pth so that you don't need a package Conflict, but that's just a hack and the problem is still there, so in the end one will need to be renamed.
Given than python-tau doesn't use any Python helpers and just dumps its modules into /usr/lib/pythonX.Y/$something-packages/, the amount of hacks needed to avoid *filesystem* conflicts is minimal. :)
-- Jakub Wilk
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