Thanks for this reminder. I was looking into this today and while this is certainly possible. But I'm concerned that the addition of breaks may break the dist-upgrader in much the same way as what happend to firefox and the firefox-theme package.
The problem is essentially the same, i.e. the libapt implementation that calculates the upgrade from dapper->edgy will not know about breaks (yet). Downloading/install dpkg early does not help here because libapt needs some understanding about the field as well. Upgrading dpkg/apt and then re-runing the dist-upgrader to calculate a new upgrade would work but it makes the operation irreversible (well, we could DOWNGRADE again *shudder*) - something that we don't really want. I see the following possible strategies: 1. put a updated apt into dapper-updates that supports breaks (and if we do this anyway add dpkg as well to avoid the extra step of the dist-upgrader). This shouldn't be too bad because presumably this changes does not change anything for packages without breaks-fields. OTOH it is going to be a invasive change in dapper (something we may not want to do after the X fiasco) 2. put a updated apt into dapper-updates that maps "breaks" to "conflicts". This means we don't win anything but we don't lose anything either. The only advantage here is that the change in apt is likely to be minimal (~5 lines of code hopefully) 3. bite the bullet and start using breaks in edgy :( None of those is very applealing. I'm open for suggestions and better ideas of course :) Cheers, Michael ** Changed in: update-manager (Ubuntu) Status: Unconfirmed => Confirmed -- update-manager for edgy needs to upgrade dpkg early on https://launchpad.net/bugs/54234 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs