Right now xdm, wdm, and gdm all conflict. I understand that the Conflicts lines are necessary with the current state of the world, and I don't have any expectation that the underlying problem will be fixed for potato.
However, all three packages are in Optional, and this is a serious problem. It means that a naive user cannot try to install all Optional packages, which the installation documentations tells them they can do. Morevover, when they try, they confusing messagses from dselect, at a time when it is least conducive to user happiness. Fixing this bug is trivial: two of the offending packages need to be moved into Extra. (If xdm is one of the packages moved into Extra, then task-x-window-system will need tweaking too.) I submitted a bug report against all three packages to this affect yesterday, and marked it Important because it has such a potentially horrible effect on naive users who tell dselect to accept all Optional packages. Again, I understand the underlying problem is hard to solve, and I certainly don't expect such work to happen in potato at this late date. But I do think that solving the policy violation is trivial, by merely reassigning any two of the packages to Extra instead of Optional. The bug report has been incorrectly downgraded to wishlist for all three packages. Policy violations are always bugs, unless they are very hard to fix. This one is trivial to fix (merely assigning two of the packages to Extra will solve it), so assigning them to Wishlist is clearly wrong. If they must be downgraded, it would be to Normal, not to Wishlist. But even then, I strongly protest and ask for some examination of the actual issue here: a user who selects all optional packages should not be presented with a confusing array of dselect errors and warnings, but should instead have a system which happily installs all the relevant packages.
