Josselin Mouette <j...@debian.org> writes: > 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? That makes sense to me on first glance. I can't think of a case where I'd want to use Provides/Conflicts/Replaces with non-virtual packages rather than using a transitional package. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- 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/87obj63axy....@windlord.stanford.edu
