Re: Question regarding helping apt replace packages
On Sun, Nov 26, 2023 at 03:00:11PM +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> Hi,
>
> https://wiki.debian.org/PackageTransition
> #11 ??
> Merge and remove: A and B existed; merge everything from A into B; A
> does not exist in new archive; B is the functioning package
>
> I'm currenly looking at a special case (and will also update the wiki for that):
> If a package takes over all files from another package but there are no
> file conflicts, is there anything in addition to Breaks that should be
> usedso that apt understands that this is a package merge?
You should be using *Conflicts* and Replaces as per policy. While apt is
currently not making use of the semantic that Conflicts+Replaces
completely replace another package, a future version may, and other
tools (e.g. ubuntu-release-upgrader in Ubuntu) do.
As a rule of thumb, Breaks are versioned, Conflicts are unversioned. I'm
not sure there are use cases for Conflicts without Replaces. Technically
this would be valid here from the semantics we have, but policy always
requires Replaces in that situation as well.
Extending policy to allow unversioned Breaks + Replaces may be useful,
but it's understandable that it's a hard problem because "Breaks" only
cause packages to be deconfigured and not removed (arguably apt will
remove them, but dpkg wouldn't on its own).
--
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