At 10:16 AM 8/23/2010 -0700, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
Well the only nuance is that --depending on the trust you have in the
project of course--
You know that you will get Bar, if you install Foo which Obsoletes it,
and that you don't need
to install Bar anymore. e.g. It just become redundant.

Right - this is the place where things potentially get tricky. If Foo obsoletes Bar, and Baz depends on Bar, then a tool shouldn't silently substitute Foo without user intervention (but it could certainly store the user's preference so as not to need that preference to be repeatedly expressed).

However, even if it is doing the substitution per the user's saved preference, it should still *mention* (at least during Baz's installation) that it's substituting Foo for Bar to satisfy Baz's request.

Otherwise, if Baz has only been tested with Bar, the author of Baz may get complaints that actually fall to regressions or changes in Foo, wasting everybody's time on debugging. If the user is warned/reminded of the substitution, there is at least a *chance* they'll remember to tell Baz's author about it. ;-)

(Obviously, this is all suggestion/recommendation rather than fiat; an installer author is of course going to do whatever they can or whatever they want. It's just a matter of clarifying intent.)

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