On Mon, Apr 14, 2003 at 11:15:36PM +0200, you wrote:
I'm not sure where you read that, but that is simply not true. Replaces
is a simple one-way relation where a package declares it will overwrite
files from another package.
Policy, section 7.5.1 (as quoted earlier in this bug thread):
If an installed package, foo say, declares that it replaces another,
bar, and an attempt is made to install bar, dpkg will discard files in
the bar package which would overwrite those already present in foo. This
is so that you can install an older version of a package without
problems.
In both situations you will have a window during which readlink will not
be available.
Screw it. I'm going to close the bugs and say that it's simply not
supported. The current behavior (complaining about the conflicting
files) doesn't actually break anything, and only happens in an odd case.
I'd rather have aesthetic breakage than real breakage. (Having a
situation where readlink can be completely gone from the system is real
breakage, having an apt run fail because you have an out-of-date
debianutils is aesthetic breakage.)
You can make it smaller by introducing a circular dependency, or make
it non-existing by shipping readlink in both packages until after the
next release and using Replaces in both packages.
That still doesn't fix the problem, which is when people install an old
version of debianutils. No change to debianutils can fix that (the
version currently in unstable doesn't have readlink and is perfectly
happy with the current coreutils.)
Mike Stone
