On 2006-05-15 15:43:31 -0500, Steve Langasek wrote: > On Mon, May 15, 2006 at 05:01:56AM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote: > > A solution that breaks the system is not a good solution. The breakage > > for official Debian packages is avoided thanks to the many conflicts > > in the "Conflicts:" field, but this doesn't work with packages that > > come from a 3rd party source[*]: as there's no such conflict, one can > > install/uninstall them without any error, with the effect that dpkg > > removes the symbolic link /usr/X11R6/bin (and prevents any later > > upgrade of x11-common). > > No, this is an incorrect description of dpkg's behavior. The > /usr/X11R6/bin symlink is left in place,
It is not left in place when the package is removed (or upgraded?). See the example I gave in my other message (with opera). > and the package you're installing that isn't conflicted with ends up > with its binaries installed to /usr/bin by following the symlink. > > This is bad, but AFAICT it's least-bad. The consequence is that the package will not necessarily work: with Opera, /usr/X11R6/bin/opera is a symlink to /usr/bin/opera. So, this is really bad, as the binary in /usr/bin may be installed first, then the symlink in /usr/X11R6/bin may overwrite the binary. > > And even with only official Debian packages, this solution is fragile, > > because if some new package adds /usr/X11R6/bin by mistake, this will > > also break the system. > > Not in the case that x11-common is unpacked before this other, new > package. If for some reason the other package needs to be removed and reinstalled, this will break. -- Vincent Lefèvre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.org/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / SPACES project at LORIA
