Dear fink developers,
We've suffered for some time with an inability to update some of our
essential packages, due to not having made splitoffs of them. There
have been discussions about ways to do this a few times in that past,
which concluded that there is no truly elegant solution to this
problem. Nevertheless, the problem remains, and only gets worse with
the passage of time.
I have a solution to propose. It involves two matters:
1) Proposed New Policy: You must declare any needed Depends or BuildDepends
of your package on essential packages. (This will allow us in the future
to change which packages are essential, without destroying the entire
Fink setup.)
2) An Upgrade of four currently Essential Packages to involve splitoffs.
The packages in question are bzip2, gettext, libiconv, and ncurses. I
have implemented this, with a slight change to the package manager (you'll
need the latest CVS version), and a bunch of packages which can be found
in experimental/dmrrsn/base . A couple of things to note:
i) Not every splitoff of an essential package needs to be essential,
but the parent of any essential package must be essential
ii) For backward compatibility, the packages which would have been
named gettext-shlibs and libiconv-shlibs are named gettext and libiconv
instead. (Otherwise, dpkg could remove a dynamic library that it
depends on during the middle of an upgrade, and everything comes to
a crashing halt: happened to me a few times in constructing these!)
Testing these is a bit tricky, because once you upgrade to the splitoff
versions, it is extremely difficult to downgrade again (again, because
of some of these essential libraries issues). Nevertheless, this needs
testing. I'd like to find a way to implement it for users quite soon.
-- Dave
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