Re: nano and pine

[Patrick Wiseman <pwiseman@gmail.com>]

On 6/6/05, Roberto C. Sanchez <roberto@familiasanchez.net> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 08:41:38PM -0400, Patrick Wiseman wrote:
> > Hello:
> >
> > I've had nano - a free replacement for pico, the editor which comes
> > with pine - installed with pine without any trouble.  But I just tried
> > to upgrade to pine 4.63, using the .deb file from washington.edu, and
> > it bailed out because nano takes over /usr/bin/pico (which I hadn't
> > realised).  So, I purged nano, and installed pine.  Now, when I try to
> > reinstall nano, _it_ bails because /usr/bin/pico belongs to the pine
> > package.  Is there any way I can force aptitude to install nano over
> > pine's pico?
> >
> 
> That's what you get for using packages from untrusted sources :-)
> Email the UW developers and tell them to read up on diversions.
> Alternatively, you can do it yourself.  I don't know much about how
> diversions work, but essentially you have one package inform the dpkg
> database that it is taking over a file that is normally owned by another
> package.  If that other package is then upgraded, the files that would
> collide are given an alternate name.  dpkg tracks everything so that if
> you remove the package that installed the diversion, the other package's
> files are moved to where they belong.

Since UW can't be trusted :), I would have thought that the
maintainers of the nano package would have taken care of that, knwoing
that nano replaces pico.  In fact, I believe they must once have done
so, because this wasn't a problem before.

Is there something I can do in apt.conf to give nano priority?

Patrick