Re: Replacing an essential package

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Please do not CC the APT team on follow-ups --- it looks like APT
already does the right thing here (sorry for the noise!).

I wrote:

> The xz-utils package in experimental Conflicts/Replaces/Provides the
> pseudo-essential package lzma. I think this should be fine, since
> installing it only involves overwriting the lzma package rather than
> removing it.
[...]
> Am I misunderstanding policy here?

I was. Using Conflicts disallows files from xz-utils and lzma from
coexisting even during an upgrade, making an upgrade impossible.

What I meant to achieve is accomplished with Replaces/Provides without
the Conflicts. Once xz-utils has written over all the files of lzma,
lzma would be marked as uninstalled, so normally the two packages
would not be installed at once.

But how to ensure all the files of lzma are overwritten, when newer
versions could always add more files? I worry because it might be
confusing to a system administrator to see the lzma package installed
when most of its important files are provided by another package. Such
an administrator might blame bugs in xz-utils on the lzma package.

Advice?

Thanks,
Jonathan