In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> wrote: >On Sat, Apr 26, 2003 at 11:12:00AM +0000, Miquel van Smoorenburg wrote: >> Sysvinit was split up in sysvinit, initscripts and sysv-rc. The last >> one can be replaced by file-rc. Sysv-rc and file-rc conflict and >> replace one another. > >Hrm. Any possibility of making sysv-rc and file-rc be concurrently >installable, via alternatives or somethign similar? That's the way mawk >and gawk work, which is a similar situation.
Well, that is perhaps possible, but 'there can be ony one'. If file-rc is the way the system runs, and you change the alternatives links to the update-rc.d/invoke-rc.d/rc/RCs of sysv-rc, you made your system unable to boot (or shutdown). Having them both installed is dangerous. Besides, I think that what apt is doing is against policy. Policy says that an essential package /can/ be replaced. Apt refuses to do that (but dpkg does it just fine). So I though that perhaps there is something that I'm overlooking. Ideas ? Perhaps I should just dive into the apt source code and fix it, but it has been years ago since I touched C++ .. Mike.