On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 05:31:12PM -0500, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
Hi Jonas,Jonas Smedegaard wrote:1) gs-common is not a "dummy" package as it does serve a purpose. Currently gs-common serves the purpose of avoiding some corner-case oddity transitioning from the multiflavored gs-gpl/gs-esp/... to the current unified one. Yes, that unification happened prior to Lenny, but I believe for maximum reliability during upgrades we should keep clutches around until after transition+1 release which in this case means *after* Squeeze can we drop gs-common (and gs-gpl and gs-esp, but that's a separate issue). We can clarify this by calling gs-common a "clutch" package rather than a "dummy" package.Could you explain this further?
Perhaps what confuses is my writing in above quote that unification happened "before Lenny". Lenny was the first stable release of Debian to contain the unified Ghostscript.
I believe this is the past and future of gs-common: Etch: ghostscript flavors depend on gs-common Lenny: ghostscript bogusly depends versioned on empty gs-common Squeeze: ghostscript depends unversioned on gs-common Squeeze+1: ghostscript need not depend on gs-commonI believe (based on my later cleanup, not the actual process at the time which I only followed briefly) that the tansition to Lenny contained flaws, including ending up with a versioned dependency on the intended-to-be dummy gs-common package, but that the very thing of depending versioned on it made it impossible for the Provides: hint in ghostscript itself to have any effect.
The gs-common preinst seems to do some removal of old alternatives; what is that about? Is the old prerm broken?
My guess is that the old packages did not properly clean up after themselves, and the convoluted transitions mad it impossible to fix that in the packages themselved (as they were dropped when it was discovered that cleanup was not good enough) so it was stuffed into the package that they transitioned into.
This is another argument that gs-common is not really a dummy package :-)
Re upgrades from etch, I did not think Debian supported that. Typically it is assumed in package maintainer scripts that an upgrade never skips a full release.
When I wrote "before Lenny" I did not mean that it was part of the Etch release of Debian, but that it became part of the Lenny release.
If you feel that you are raising a different point then please try again.
Hope this helps, - Jonas -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private
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