What is the preferred method of effecting a package rename and upgrade between versions?
Movie Mate v0.9.2 is currently in the Debian archive. Due to upstream changes (added tracking for other media types), the name has been changed to Media Mate. Thus, Media Mate is the upgrade to Movie Mate. This leaves me with the question of how to properly change the package name and upgrade installations of the older package. In building the new Media Mate package, I've declared a Conflicts with the moviemate package to effect moviemate's uninstall when the mediamate package is installed. However, this leaves the question of migrating the moviemate's configuration to mediamate. For this, I pull the debconf answers for moviemate's questions and set them as the answers to mediamate's questions (which are mostly the same), and set the _seen_ flag to true so the questions will not be asked (much like an upgrade where the package name has not changed). Since the package name has changed, the configuration and data files are now stored in different locations. So, I plan on moving the data files to their new location. But, what about the old configuration files, and the old package's state in dpkg? Should these be removed since the new package is installed (more or less an upgrade) or should these be left because the old package hasn't been purged and the new one has a different name? Also, moviemate has asks a question during install about removing the DB on purge, with the answer stored in debconf's db. During the upgrade would it be acceptable to clear this answer under moviemate once it's been migrated to mediamate since the old DB is upgraded and used by mediamate and a purge of moviemate would then remove a database that's still in use? Or, should mediamate copy the old database and and leave it for moviemate to potentially purge? Personally, I'm leaning toward having the new package manually remove all the old packages configuration files and unsetting the DB purge flag. But, I can see how this may be seen as a bad thing. Thus, I figured I'd ask here for comments and suggestions on how to handle this type of situation. -- Jamin W. Collins This is the typical unix way of doing things: you string together lots of very specific tools to accomplish larger tasks. -- Vineet Kumar
