tl/dr: I think we should update parallel to not conflict with moreutils and fix a couple of the other bugs (esp #674695 and #816058).
Unless someone objects I will do (or sponsor) an NMU. I used dpkg --force-conflicts --install to install both moreutils and parallel together. The result is that parallel diverts moreutils's /usr/bin/parallel to parallel.moreutils, and /usr/bin/parallel is the GNU one. This seems fine. I edited my /var/lib/dpkg/status to remove the Conflicts line and now my apt is happy. I agree that alternatives would be a better approach than this diversion, but the diversion is IMO tolerable. It's not brilliant, because it means that: If the system administrator wants to install GNU parallel as /usr/bin/parallel.gnu, but leave /usr/bin/parallel as moreutils, they have to manually locally divert GNU parallel to /usr/bin/parallel.gnu, and make a symlink. This is annoying but hardly a crisis. Most of the time if someone installs both moreutils and parallel, they want the GNU parallel (after all, they have asked for it explicitly). This is not true of moreutils because it's full of other useful things. For the same reason, the Conflicts is bad because someone might want other functionality from moreutils together with GNU parallel (which is suggested by the documentation for AFL, for example, and is fairly widely used in scientific computing). I suggest that for now, we drop the Conflicts from parallel and rely on the diversion. If someone submits a set of patches to transition us to an alternatives-based system then we should apply them. This does not mean I don't disagree with some of Joey Hess's criticisms in https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=665851#47 The parallel package looks like the maintainer could do with some help, looking at the package tracker. I don't know if the maintainer is reading this. Dear maintainer, if you are reading this, please don't take my NMU proposal as aggressive. I would just like to help fix the program. If you have different ideas about what should be done please let me know. Regards, Ian. -- Ian Jackson <[email protected]> These opinions are my own. If I emailed you from an address @fyvzl.net or @evade.org.uk, that is a private address which bypasses my fierce spamfilter.
