Bug#62541: 62541: Is it really required to check for old tex packages still?

[Christoph Martin <martin@uni-mainz.de>]

Denis Barbier writes:
 > On Wed, 19 Apr 2000, Santiago Vila wrote:
 > 
 > > On Mon, 17 Apr 2000, Wichert Akkerman wrote:
 > > 
 > > > Previously Santiago Vila wrote:
 > > > > In other words: I don't think people will skip Debian 1.3, Debian 2.0
 > > > > and Debian 2.1 to upgrade directly from Debian 1.2 to Debian 2.2.
 > > > 
 > > > Actually I've heard of at least two persons doing an 1.2->2.1 upgrade,
 > > > and I'm willing to bet someone will do a 1.2->2.2 upgrade as well.
 > > 
 > > I stand corrected, then :-)
 > > 
 > > What is annoying is that all three tetex-* packages check for the old 
 > > tex packages. Would not be enough to check for them only once and
 > > create a file somewhere whose existence indicates that there are not
 > > old tex packages installed?
 > 
 > After reading tetex-*.preinst i guess that this removal of old TeX
 > packages was induced by ``a missing feature in the packaging system''.
 > I have no idea on what this does mean, but would it be possible to make
 > tetex-* depend (or pre-depend?) on a certain version of dpkg which fixes
 > this problem?

I don't know if this is fixed now in dpkg. If I remember right, dpkg
was not able to provide, conflict AND replace more than one package
AND remove them on installation of the replacing package. So we had to
find a way to check which packages the user had to remove by hand
before we could install the tetex packages.

Christoph