On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 11:15 PM, Michael G Schwern <schw...@pobox.com> wrote: > When it comes to packaging, my first thought is always WDDD? What Does Debian > Do? They usually do it right. > > AFAIK Debian doesn't have such a thing. > http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#s-controlfieldslist > Closest thing they have is Conflicts. > http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html#s-conflicts > > Why? They don't need it. They already know what's installed, what package > owns what file and can fully uninstall the old version on upgrade. This > solves a great many problems. > > We don't have that, but we should. Imma let you finish and not hijack your > post to talk about that. And IMO we should continue to assume we don't have a > package database until we actually do.
We have packlists, so we can easily map a distribution to its files. The reverse mapping can be generated from this, though this is relatively expensive.
