On Thu, 7 Dec 1995, Michael Alan Dorman wrote:
> On Thu, 7 Dec 1995, Ian Jackson wrote: > > That all sounds reasonable. I take it that the terminfo manipulation > > programs and the manpages are small enough that having them installed > > on every system is not a problem (ncurses-runtime will be an essential > > package). > > Actually, they're going into a different package. > > > Also, we need to decide on the package naming conventions for shared > > library packages. >[...] > > The runtime package needs to contain the shared library major version > > number in its name, and we need to be prepared to install several > > versions. > > Done. Is it necessary or appropriate to have ncurses-dev be > ncurses2-dev? Correct me if I'm wrong, but we don't plan to support > people compiling with multiple versions, so it should be sufficient to > make sure that ncurses-dev merely has the correct dependencies, right? I don't see how this addresses the need for shared libraries to be in an essential packages. If multiple versions may be installed, and older versions might be superseded by newer versions, which essential package will contain the shared libraries? Does dpkg support a virtual package being declared essential? Perhaps if a package declared essential also has a Provides line, the virtual package so named should be considered essential, and dpkg should refuse to remove the last package providing that virtual package. All ncurses shared libs packages could then privede ncurses-shlibs or somesuch, and be dechared essential. (perhaps dpkg already works this way??).
