Hi, the Debian policy makes a special case of the Provides/Conflicts/Replaces combination, allowing to replace a package by another.
The document mentions the case of a virtual package, for which this is nice and all, but it is still allowed for other packages. However, any versioned dependency is broken when you handle upgrades this way. Even worse, APT does not handle such situations very well. Bug #691160 is a good example of what happens in a bad case (the old package not being installable anymore). Arguably this is a bug in APT, but we are more prone to such bugs by allowing arcane relationships between packages. It looks to me that we should strictly favor the transitional package approach instead. Shouldn’t we entirely forbid the Provides/Conflicts/Replaces combination way of handling upgrades, except for virtual packages? Cheers, -- .''`. Josselin Mouette : :' : `. `' `- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/1352454210.3618.794.camel@pi0307572
