Am 24.07.03 um 16:19:15 schrieb Daniel Kobras: > [...] But I also wanted to be nice to the user and > automatically remove the dummy dx-dev once it's no longer needed. > Therefore, libdx4-dev replaces anything in dx-dev, and dpkg removes the > package. [...]
Cool strategy, but in general too complicated.[1] It happens from time to time that a rename has to take place. Perhaps the maintainer made a mistake in the past, perhaps upstream decided to change the name of the program (Phoenix -> Firebird). Currently, you make a new package, with Replaces: and Conflicts: and stuff, but it will not be installed. So you make a transitional package with the description "can be removed", but that's ugly. (All this is exactly what Daniel said already, just a little more general.) What I would like to see is some means to make this process easy. Such as the following algorithm: If package A disappears from the distribution, but there is a package B that replaces it, install that automatically.[2] I'm not sure whether this might have any unwanted side effects... Alternatively, there could be a new control field, say "Supersedes:", which would result in the above behaviour. Of course, there'd have to be a change in policy... In any case, package frontends would have to implement it first, so it could be used only after the next release. Bye, Mike [1] The new package perhaps has a slightly different set of files. [2] Well, perhaps not in pure apt-get, but in dselect. -- |=| Michael Piefel |=| Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin |=| Tel. (+49 30) 2093 3831