[Pkg-octave-devel] Bug#463039: Bug#463039: why does octave3.0 provide: octave2.9?

[Steve Langasek]

On Sun, Feb 03, 2008 at 10:58:03PM +0100, Rafael Laboissiere wrote:
> > In practice, most of the reverse-depends of octave2.9 have versioned
> > dependencies on octave2.9, so most of these will refuse to accept octave3.0
> > as a replacement.  And octave3.0 also *conflicts* with octave2.9, so they're
> > not exactly co-installable either.  Something looks very wrong here.

> I am revisiting this issue now and need some advice from you.  The goal of
> having octave3.0 conflicting/replacing/providing octave2.9 is to ensure that
> users having octave2.9 installed will be upgraded to octave3.0.  This is
> correct from the upstream point of view, because the 2.9.* series of Octave
> were considered as pre-releases of Octave 3.0.0 (I know, I know, we should
> have used octave3.0 as the source package name to start with...)

> Now, would just conflicts/replaces achieve that goal?

To the best of my knowledge, none of these configurations achieve that goal.
While there's lore among Debian developers to the effect that
"Conflicts/Replaces" will trigger the package manager to pull in the new
package automatically as a replacement for the obsolete package, I have
never seen this happen in practice with any of the frontends.

The only two configurations that I know to achieve this purpose are:

- create a dummy package under the old package name, which depends on the
  new package name
- keep the old package name for the new version of the software

Cheers,
-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org