Corinna Vinschen writes: > I'm not against adding some functionality along these lines (provided > you also fix upset), but I'm not so sure about the broad definition of > the version state pattern. It feels as generating problems down the > road. Think setup.hint. Your patch would requite to recognize more or > less any string as version state:
Thats easily fixable by requiring a constant prefix ("ver-" or even just "v" looks like something that should work). But besides that issue I don't think that setup.exe makes this easily useable. If I understand the motivation of John correctly, he'd want to keep an older version of the X server installable, or maybe as another example let's say I'd want to make it possible to keep perl-5.14 around for a while. I don't think people would want to click on hundreds of chooser boxes until they have some set of old versions that are (or maybe not) working together. This is only useful if that set of old packages can somehow be ganged together and switched all at once, IMHO. This probably means a meta-package that pulls in versioned dependencies. The dirty little secret of setup is that it already has those versioned dependencies and can probably also deal with different dependencies for each trust level and replace packages (in other words, the obsoletiohn dance we're normally doing may be unnecessary). It also has recommends, suggests, depends and conflicts. These features have quite likely bit-rotted and documentation is almost non-existing, but they're already built in. Regards, Achim. -- +<[Q+ Matrix-12 WAVE#46+305 Neuron microQkb Andromeda XTk Blofeld]>+ SD adaptations for KORG EX-800 and Poly-800MkII V0.9: http://Synth.Stromeko.net/Downloads.html#KorgSDada