On 22-Aug-2026, Helmut Grohne wrote: > On Sat, Aug 22, 2026 at 11:59:19AM +1000, Ben Finney wrote: > > The correction is to tighten the relationship to “Conflicts”, that > > signals to ‘dpkg’ it must not unpack over the existing package. (As > > described in Policy §7.4, “Conflicting binary packages - "Conflicts"”.) > > Note that Conflicts rarely is the right solution.
Thanks for asking how to improve this. I think, if you want a better solution to become the norm, then we need to make that better solution the *one obvious* solution that is found. When a maintainer learns (through a bug report, or otherwise) that a “Breaks: package (<= older-version)” is insufficient? That maintainer will go looking in places like the Policy document. That IMO means that the desired solution must be found right there, or anywhere the maintainer is likely to go looking for a solution. Currently, my quick reading of the Policy document led to the comparison of “Breaks” versus “Conflicts”; that was apparently the most salient difference, so that's what I reached for. -- \ “A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of | `\ five.” —Groucho Marx | _o__) | Ben Finney <[email protected]>
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