Re: Can imagemagick really be safely purged or removed?

[Celejar <celejar@gmail.com>]

On Mon, 23 Oct 2017 20:09:59 -0400
The Wanderer <wanderer@fastmail.fm> wrote:

> On 2017-10-23 at 19:24, Celejar wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 23 Oct 2017 20:23:46 +0100 Roger Lynn <Roger@rilynn.me.uk>
> > wrote:
> > 
> >> On 23/10/17 11:00, Jörg-Volker Peetz wrote:
> >> 
> >>> Since I use a pure 64-bit system, I overlooked that only one of 
> >>> imagemagick-6.q16 or imagemagick-6.q16:i386 can be installed. I
> >>> think it's better to re-install imagemagick-6.q16. And then show
> >>> the output when trying to purge imagemagick, please. I think
> >>> there must be involved a i386 version of some cups package.
> >> 
> >> Celejar answered the question in the first post. It's very simple: 
> >> imagemagick can not be removed because cups-filters depends on it.
> > 
> > Okay, but why do packages depend on other packages that declare that 
> > they are dummies and can be safely removed? Is this a bug in the 
> > dummy package' description, or in the package that has the
> > dependency, or just unclear / misleading terminology?
> 
> Generally (though perhaps not universally), the dummy package was not
> originally a dummy, but was split out into two or more separate packages
> and now exists only to aid the transition to those new packages.
> 
> In other words, it's usually for historical reasons.
> 
> Failures like the one you're looking at crop up when other packages
> haven't yet been updated to depend on the new packages instead of the
> old one.

So should I file a bug against the other packages?

Celejar