Gregor Hoffleit writes: > Regarding (2): Making the dependency explicit (by using > /usr/bin/python1.5) is just playing safe. > > As far as I can see, if we hadn't the legacy of the existing packages > and installations, and if versioned dependencies would work on all > systems in all situations, we could come up with a quite clean setup: > python-base et al. could be empty packages (virtual packages wouldn't > work!), and other packages could depend on them (e.g. "Depends: > "python-base (>= 2.0), python-gtk" for a package that need at least > Python 2.0 or better. Still in this case, what could you do if Python > 2.3 broke that script ?) > > But we haven't an ideal situation, so we have to fight with that kind of > legacy. > > But maybe it brings us to the core of the problem: > > As far as I can tell our principal problem is that there's a large set > of existing packages (from slink, potato) that have wrong dependencies > (like unversioned "Depends: python-base" for packages that depend on > Python 1.5.2) that would be (erronously) satisfied if we just continued > to use python-base and so on. > > One way to resolve this is to include a huge list of conflicts in > python-base et al. > > Another way to resolve this is to drop these package names, perhaps in > favour of some other package names.
Asking our apt developer Jason Gunthorpe, he pointed out, that such a huge list of Conflicts would not work due to limitations in dpkg and apt. I don't like the second alternative, because it needs interaction of the package maintainers involved ... I don't like introducing another new package name either as proposed by Carey in http://lists.debian.org/debian-python/2001/debian-python-200110/msg00090.html. Gregor pointed out that python-base is almost a complete python package, so we could rename it and "reuse" the name "python", "python1.5", "python2.1" for the base packages. So the python-base package would look like Package: python Depends: python2.1 Conflicts: python-base, <plus the 10 other packages, which depend on python, but do not declare a versioned dependency> Matthias PS: I'll make me rare on debian-python 'til the weekend (preparing gcc-3.0 packages ...)