On Sat, May 21, 2011 at 17:56, Carsten Hey <cars...@debian.org> wrote: > With above exclamation mark syntax, we could also express "weak > conflicts", e.g.: > > Package: X > Recommends: !Y > > Apt would remove Y by default if X gets installed, but users could > overwrite this.
As a user i hate it then packages are removed just because the maintainer is bored and wants to force it now. That forces the user in dist-upgrades to distinguish between different remove-types and the package manager can very seldomly help with that: a) two packages do not work (well) together b) package A is unmaintained c) the maintainer of package B is bored With my APT hat i can add that apt-get and friends do not like removes, too. c) happens all the time in package renames without a good reason as this could be done later by the user with autoremove or deborphan or whatever at a time the user expects the need to decide between keeping a package or not. At dist-upgrade time it's a big annoyance and can even prevent upgrades as a user has to fear that with the 200 packages which are going to be removed by the dist-upgrade a lot of features will be gone, too. So he will delay it until more time is available for checking everything. Beside that the 190 renames hide the 10 removes the user should really have a look at… Yet alone that these removes tend to cause "unexpected results" anyway as the recent libtar to libtar0 rename did for example… Not that it would be too unexpected that a package manager can decide against removing a package, it's just that maintainers never expect that… And no, the solution to this is not to downgrade c) to a weak conflict. The solution is to help autoremove and deborphan detect A properly by hinting that the package A is obsolete (section: oldlibs, debtags, …) and handle it in a different step. It's just bad to try to do everything at the same time… Best regards David Kalnischkies, who is already waiting for 'iceweasel recommends !chromium' -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/BANLkTik=jfoy-jaivm1i6wzmskm9tp-...@mail.gmail.com
