On Tue, Aug 13, 2002 at 08:09:26PM +0900, Junichi Uekawa wrote: > > $ apt-get install A > > > > which in this state leaves you with a non-working program. Same thing > > for upgrading just libA. > > So, package libA should really conflict with every program that was > previously compiled with it, to minimize confusion.
With every, uhm, *package* that links explicitly against the non-versioned libpng2. (We can't do much about things that are not packages, like I said before). > To achieve that goal, a package rename can happen. Renaming packages is a pain. A real pain. We can't honestly say that we have a good way of dealing with that. For libraries we are just lucky enough, because those beasts are pulled by other packages. apt tends to get things right, even if it likes to tell you that it will deinstall half your system in order to upgrade one package *g*. There's also some ammount of pain in the way from unstable to testing. Package A depends on B provided by source C. C no longer provides B but D and the version of A in unstable depends on that. I don't know if this is still the case, but the testing scripts used to react like "uh?" to this situation, particularly if A wasn't one package but a bunch of them. > I am worried looking at the confusion libgtk rename is causing, > because people seem to think having a nonworking package > (libsdl-image1.2/libsdl-perl/frozen-bubble) than conflicting packages > that cannot be installed at the same time (and probably rightly). $ apt-get install foo Hey! I want to remove 400 packages here, should I? [Y/y] People usually don't like the look of that. Besides, this kind of renaming creates non-sensical names (libgtk2.0-0png3) which in the long run create more trouble (from a user's point of view). I remember Rasterman asking why he had to install libttf2 in order to get FreeType 1. After explaining it to him, he expected libXext.so.6 to be in the package called libxext6... or something along those lines. I'm not actually waiting with eagerness the moment when I have to tell people to install "lib 'je 'te 'ka two dot 'o dash 'o 'pe 'en 'je three". Hopefully that will never have to happen since that name will be well hidden behind other dependencies. Don't get me wrong, they are necessary evil, but I'd try harder to avoid them (if technically possible). Technically, libgtk2.0-0 could have been called libgtk2 and there would have been nothing wrong about that. -- Marcelo
