Hello to all friendly people reading this ... I'm pkging new upstream of a quite basic lib (libgii).
Two small (<10k) demos, where at least one is practically usable, this is, would be nice to have it installed as binary, are to be installed with the binary pkg. The previous debian release has them in the libs pkg, which violates policy (11.3) for good reasons as you'll immediately notice. Policy also states that (small) runtime utils may be with a small -dev pkg. This is what i opt for to avoid archive pollution with a lib-utils pkg for that 2 demos. But remember, i'ld really like to include them. Upgrading of that pkg is no problem. The old-lib vanishes, the new not including the utils installs. Same for the -dev, the old one being replaced with the new which includes the utils. But downgrading naturally blows. The utils (in new -dev) would have to be overwritten from the old to be installed lib-pkg. Fiddling with every available relationship field was instructive but the best result i could achieve, was that dpkg would refuse to install at all because of conflicts. The only other idea, that came to my mind, is to use pre- and postrm and postinst scripts of the new lib! to rename the installed utils of the new -dev! in prerm, and remove the renamed versions when the old lib has properly installed. I tried this, the scripts do what they should in the right order to the right time, but dpkg doesn't compare file system but ...dpkg/info/pkg.list. This released me from thinking about, how i could provoke upgrade-abort but now i'm stuck. -- Would that be 'legal' anyway? Modifiying installed files of one pkg by the scripts of another? (They're closely related however and chances are good that after all this weird stuff, the next pkg to be removed would be the manipulated -dev anyway). -- If so, is there a place to find the dpkg base directory. I would have to rewrite the filelist. -- If not, what else besides leaving those silly programs out could i do? Is there a 'use-by date' for old pkgs? Else i can only hope that upstream bump up its version soon ... That demo is nice, but such a long post for this ...? See it as a testcase - i learned a lot already ;-) greetings, martin
