Noah L. Meyerhans wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Oct 1998, Lance Arsenault wrote:
>
> > Background: Debian 1.3.1 would not let you install all the software
> > in the release. Installing all the software in the release saves a
> > lot of time, and hard drive space is cheeper than time.
> >
> > I have used Debian 1.3.1 in the past but I think that having packages
> > that confict is a bad thing. I think that making all the packages
> > in Debian compatable would be a big plus. In Debian 1.3.1 this is
> > not the cast. For example you cannot install emacs and xemacs in Debian
> > 1.3.1 . I'm guessing some of the filenames in these two packages are the
> > same. To get rid of this confict you can just install them in different
> > directories or something like that.
>
> This issue was discussed just recently on this list. Some packages
> naturally conflict. The emacs/xemacs conflict was resolved for 2.0, but
> there are other cases where a conflict is simply a fact of life that can't
> easily be avoided. The example that came up most frequently involved
> smail, sendmail, exim, etc. It would make no sense to be able to install
> each of these on a single system. Having them all installed at once would
> lead to chaos, because they'd all be trying to do each others job (that
> is, deliver mail for the system). Some package conflicts are inherent to
> the nature of the package, not to the way Debian puts together its
> distribution.
That being said, perhaps there should be a predefined installation selection
(among the listed configurations you get when you run dselect on a new
installation) where something as close as possible to "everything" is
installed. So if there are multiple, conflicting versions of a library or
tool, the newest stable version would be installed; Where there are
conflicts between functionally overlapping packages (like smail/sendmail/exim
as you mentioned above), perhaps it should install none of them, and output
into a log file some human-readable summary of which conflicting packages the
user may want to choose from, so they can easily see what they might want to
go back and install later. Just some ideas...
--
Jack Nutting : [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Research & Trade : www.rat.se
