I leave it up to you of course, but I am a proponent of allowing one to change providers.
The question being asked is whether or not libgl1 will be provided when the task is completed. For instance had I installed xlibmesag3 first it wouldn't have been an issue unless I wanted to change to mesag3. I would expect that if one package became obsoleted by another, or encapsulated by yet another then migrating between the various providers should be allowed provided all versions match up. for instance: somefeature somenewfeature is the new somefeature and provides somefeature someotherfeature is compatible and so also provides somefeature I would think that I should be able to switch between these three packages equally because the somefeature requirement is met under all conditions. This seems to be supported by dpkg now, just only on first install, but not on migration. mesag3 provides libgl1 xlibmesag3 provides libgl1 somepackage requires libgl1 Why should it care who the provider is, or if the provider has changed? I think this is similar to the MTA requirement. It doesn't care whether Postfix provides the MTA or Exim provides it, it just cares that there is one. If it needed a specific feature from Postfix it should ask require Postfix. If later some other MTA is Postfix compatible and says it provides Postfix, then transitioning to the new package that provides postfix should be allowed. Just my $0.02 I don't spend all day long thinking about this stuff it just seems to be what makes sense to me. In this case the "provides" line should probably also support versions if it doesn't already. That way the new package could say it supports "Postfix 1.1.11" and anything requiring higher than that knows that it can't depend on the new package to satisfy that requirement. -- Michael -- ----- Original Message ----- From: "Thomas Hood" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Michael Fair" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, October 15, 2002 11:25 PM Subject: Re: Bug#112211 > Hi, and thanks for the additional info. > > dpkg is actually behaving correctly here. > > In order to install xlibmesag3 dpkg has to remove > mesag3 first. However, removing mesag3 would break > the dependency on libgl1. So, dpkg cannot proceed. > > Changing from one provider of libgl1 to another is > different from upgrading a provider of libgl1. > In the latter case, the package remains in the > installed state throughout the procedure. > > Do we want to modify dpkg so that it will go ahead > anyway in circumstances like these? I'm not sure. > > -- > Thomas > > > On Wed, 2002-10-16 at 04:26, Michael Fair wrote: > > This happened a long time ago so I do not recall > > the specifics but it was much more than just > > a spruious warning. I eventually had to force > > the install to happen. > > > > There was a package installed that required libgl1. > > This was originally provided by mesag3. > > xlibmesag3 also provided libgl1. > > > > If I tried to install xlibmesag3 it would error > > out complaining that doing so would break the > > package that relied on libgl1. > > > > So the error was something about the provides line > > of packages to be installed not being recognized > > when checking if removing a package would break > > dependencies. > > >
