Re: Status of pythondialog in Debian
On 22 October 2014 09:47, Florent Rougon <f.rougon@free.fr> wrote:
> It is in unstable, thank you! I wonder if the new package
> (python3-dialog) should not have Conflicts and Replaces with
> python-dialog. Although I suppose both packages can be installed at the
> same time, the current situation may leave the old, unmaintained
> python-dialog forever installed on users' systems (until manual removal
> or removal of Python 2...).
>
> What do you think?
Replaces: would not be appropriate or necessary since none of the
files are overlapping; this is only necessary when two packages
install files to the same location, and the one package must be
installed over the other.
Conflicts: would not be appropriate either, because both packages will
work just fine when coinstalled, as you mention.
It is indeed possible for a removed package ("obsolete package", as
aptitude etc. call it) to stay on user systems forever, unless the
user takes some action, but I think the packaging tools and
documentation provide the necessary tools for users to address this.
For example, the release notes have a section on this topic:
https://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/i386/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.html#obsolete
aptitude will list the package under "Obsolete and Locally Created
Packages"), I believe the other package management frontends will do
something similar. If the old python-dialog package is working for
some user (there is no package in Debian using python-dialog, but
perhaps they have some locally installed software using it), then I
expect they can just continue to use it, whereas if it is not being
used then it doesn't really cause any harm by being installed on their
system.
--
mithrandi, i Ainil en-Balandor, a faer Ambar
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