On Sat, 2002-08-10 at 21:59, Glenn McGrath wrote: > If it could be done safely in one step then im sure we can all agree that > it would be better aproach.
It can't. To split a package, you have to add a Depends: for one Debian release. That's just how it works. For example, the spamassassin maintainer decided to split spamc out of spamassassin into its own package. I was using spamc to filter my mail, and when I upgraded to the newer spamassassin, spamc was removed. This, needless to say, broke my email filtering. So, just like dpkg, the spamassassin maintainer will have to live with a Depends for one Debian release. After that, he can remove the dependency.