Re: Question about obsolete Conflicts
On Tue, 2007-03-06 at 01:43 +0000, Regis Boudin wrote:
> Playing around with dependencies trees, I noticed there are quite a few
> obsolete Conflicts fields in the archive. Would it be worth starting a
> bit of cleanup after Etch is released ? I think having the archive
> cleaner from this point of view might not be a bad thing.
Cleaning is good. Note that there's a difference between "old" and
"obsolete". Some old conflicts can still be useful for users with long
upgrade paths, with some old packages still installed. Also, some
conflicts are against packages not in the Debian repository at all, and
also those conflicts can be useful.
>
> I mean... There are things like the 98 packages which still conflict
> with a pre-woody suidmanager, or apache with apache-modules which was
> removed from the archive 9 years ago,
Maybe the maintainers have good reasons, no idea.
> and I only had a quick look, so
> there are probably many more of these. I found 4410 "Conflicts" fields
> in the Packages file for main (with 19835 packages, that makes 22%),
> and
> it can only grow and need more useless processing to check dependencies
> if it's never cleaned up.
That is a good reason to want to clean up.
>
> Shouldn't there be some sort of best practice or recommandation
> somewhere about cleaning this field when it becomes useless ?
If it's not already mentioned in debian-policy, then it could be added
that obsolete/duplicate/redundant conflicts should be
simplified/removed.
I think that it's difficult to find an approach for an efficient
all-packages review about old/obsolete conflicts.
>
> Any comment to tell me whether I got it wrong or not is welcome :)
Not wrong. Just a matter of tuning the scope a bit. :)
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