On Mon, May 15, 2023 at 4:05 PM Martin-Éric Racine <martin-eric.rac...@iki.fi> wrote: > > On Mon, May 15, 2023 at 10:42 AM Shengjing Zhu <z...@debian.org> wrote: > > Copying our policy 7.4: > > > > Neither Breaks nor Conflicts should be used unless two packages cannot be > > installed at the same time or installing them both causes one of them to be > > broken or unusable. Having similar functionality or performing the same > > tasks > > as another package is not sufficient reason to declare Breaks or Conflicts > > with that package. > > The Conflicts/Provides isn't there because they provide similar > features. It is there because the backend has no way of selecting > which DHCP client will be used. >
But they can be installed together right? then it falls into the policy that Breaks/Conflicts is not the right place. People can just uninstall other clients manually to let the ifupdown to choose the wanted backend. It may have weird use cases like, using different implementations of dhcp client for different hardware interfaces. I believe the policy is there to not restrict the usefulness of different implementations. > This is a case similar to sendmail. I don't think so. The mail-transport-agent packages both ship /usr/sbin/sendmail file. This is allowed and suggested by the policy to use Conflicts/Replaces. -- Shengjing Zhu
