(discovered whilst doing bug 4885) I'm not sure our current conversion of RPM's "Obsoletes" is entirely correct. We currently translate this to a "Replaces"/"Conflicts" pair, which seems to be what Debian suggests here: https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html#replacing-whole-packages-forcing-their-removal We noticed this on bug 7279 comment 19. We also noticed that something wasn't entirely correct and added an extra "Provides" to work around the issue. However when I look at this again, I notice more details in Debian's "Conflicts" chapter: https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html#conflicting-binary-packages-conflicts And in Debian's guide for renaming a package: https://wiki.debian.org/RenamingPackages What they state is that "Breaks" should be used in this case, not "Conflicts". So far we haven't seen any practical differences between the two, but it might be safer to go with what Debian recommends.
We could see if we can find examples similar to what we've done in Debian's official packages.
Also note that the installer currently doesn't have any support for "Breaks", so that needs to be added.
(In reply to Pierre Ossman from comment #1) > We could see if we can find examples similar to what we've done in Debian's > official packages. I had a look at wireshark and how they dealt with the rename from ethereal, and found this: > Breaks: ethereal (<< 1.0.0-3), > wireshark (<< 2.0.0~), > wireshark-qt (<< 2.0.0~rc3+g841d5e1) > Replaces: ethereal (<< 1.0.0-3), > wireshark (<< 2.0.0~), > wireshark-qt (<< 2.0.0~rc3+g841d5e1) So Breaks/Replaces seem to indeed be the right combo.
Unfortunately this doesn't seem to work in practice. apt is fine with either "Breaks" or "Conflicts". In both cases it realises that the old packages should be removed before the new one is added. However dpkg prints this when using Conflicts: > dpkg: considering removing thinlinc-tladm in favour of thinlinc-server ... > ... But with Breaks it just bails: > dpkg: regarding .../thinlinc-server_4.14.0post-0.unknown_amd64.deb containing thinlinc-server: > thinlinc-server breaks thinlinc-tladm (<< 4.15.0) > thinlinc-tladm (version 4.6.0-5144) is present and installed. > > dpkg: error processing archive ./thinlinc-server_4.14.0post-0.unknown_amd64.deb (--install): > installing thinlinc-server would break thinlinc-tladm, and > deconfiguration is not permitted (--auto-deconfigure might help) > Errors were encountered while processing: > ./thinlinc-server_4.14.0post-0.unknown_amd64.deb So unfortunately Conflicts seems to be the more practical option, even if it isn't the recommended one.
