On 2012-12-06 02:12, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
I understand the PEP author's frustration with continued discussion,
but I think this subthread on Obsoletes vs. Obsoleted-By is not mere
bikeshedding on names. It matters *which package* presents the
information.
Donald Stufft writes:
> On Wednesday, December 5, 2012 at 6:18 PM, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> > On Dec 05, 2012, at 06:07 PM, Donald Stufft wrote:
> >
> > > If you're installing B you've prescribed trust to that
> > > author. If you don't trust the author then why are you
> > > installing (and then executing) code they wrote.
The author may be a genius when it comes to writing code, and an idiot
when it comes to distributing it. Distribution is much harder than it
looks, as you know. Trusting the author's *content* and trusting the
author's *metadata* are not equivalent!
As far as I can see, the semantics of putting "Obsoletes: A" into B
without changing A are the same as the semantics of putting "Provides:
A" into B (without changing A).[1] Only if A includes "Obsoleted-By: B"
can a user be confident that B is a true successor to A.
Furthermore, as has been pointed out, the presence of "Obsoleted-By"
in A has the huge advantage of informing users and developers of
dependent packages alike that A is obsolete when they try to update A.
If A is not changed, then an attempted update will tell them exactly
that, and they may never find out about B. But if A is modified in
this trivial way, the package system can automatically inform them.
This is also trivial, requiring no database queries.
"Simple is better than complex."
That makes sense.
In summary, someone using B won't care that it has replaced A, but
someone using A needs to be told that it has been replaced by B.
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