(Gigantic crosspost trimmed.)
Raul Miller writes ("Re: binary-alpha and binary-sparc directories"):
> It does look like dvips was superceeded by some other package, and
> that it did originally have some executables in it. [All I have on my
> system from dvips is a copyright statement and some .tex
> files]. makeidx, metafont and xdvi also seem to be mere stubs of
> packages on my system.
dvipsk should have a Conflicts line to ensure that dselect/dpkg will
remove dvips.
> /usr/bin/fort77 is a perl script, the only other things I see in this
> package are a man page and a copyright statement. Since I have f2c on
> my system as a separate package, I'd guess that fort77 has also been
> superceeded...
Again, a Conflicts line would have done the right thing.
> I think this is a bug in the debian packaging mechanisms.
Well, I could change dpkg so that it would barf in this situation,
rather than going ahead and removing the files from the earlier
package, but I think that would have been less helpful.
Ian.
