Further remarks on failed upgrade of mtools.

[Alan Eugene Davis <adavis@kuentos.guam.net>]

I have just posted concerning the failed upgrades of mtools and two other 
packages, based on their dependency upon a newer release-revision of libc5.

I have further noted two interesting aspects that should be emphasized:

(1) Why doesn't dpkg check first for dependencies and conflicts,
before unpacking?  If it had checked first, this problem---of having
files on the system but configuration files not yet set up---would not
have come up at all!

(2) Mtools has completely changed the type and name of the
configuration file, so that in the /etc directory of the system that
hasn't been yet configured, I now have the NEW mtools executables, and
not the old ones that were working ok (as far as I know) anywhere on
the system, but the OLD STYLE configuration files that presumeably the
new executables won't understand.

electra:/etc# ls -l mto*
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root           75 Apr 21 12:47 mtab
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root     root          469 Apr 18 04:59 mtools.conf.dpkg-new*
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root     root         1013 Apr  9 20:23 mtools.ref*
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root     root         1005 Jan  2 15:18 mtools.ref~*


In other words, dpkg has broken my setup again.
Number (2) wouldn't have happened if only number (1).



Alan Davis