[Aptitude-devel] aptitude 0.6.8-1

[Sven Joachim]

On 2012-06-06 12:16 +0200, Daniel Hartwig wrote:

> On 6 June 2012 17:47, Sven Joachim <svenjoac at gmx.de> wrote:
>> There is a problem with aptitude-common, it has an apparently unintended
>> circular dependency on aptitude.  This happens because
>> /usr/share/doc/aptitude-common is a symlink to aptitude, and debhelper
>> helpfully creates the dependency to respect Policy § 12.3.
>>
>
> Nice spot, I had not noticed the dependency.
>
> I had used the symlink option to simplify installing files with
> debhelper, but it can certainly be avoided with some rigging.  I guess
> the files aptitude-doc- are also affected by this.

Arguably, aptitude-doc* could depend on aptitude-common instead.  In any
case, if you want to make /usr/share/doc/aptitude-doc* symlinks you need
maintainer scripts to remove the old directories on upgrade.

> Without depending on aptitude, can -common still install files to
> /usr/share/doc/aptitude? (Files such as examples/, though these are
> for an old, disused, and practically-deprecated feature.)

Yes, that's no problem.

>> Maybe the conffiles, the /var/lib/aptitude directory and the postrm
>> script would also better be located in aptitude
>
> Put in to aptitude-common because they are also shared with GTK+ and
> Qt+ interfaces.  But that is a non-issue until either of those is
> resurrected.

I see.

>> (downgrading to 0.6.7-1
>> and then purging aptitude-common will lead to a nasty surprise, for
>> instance).
>
> Is downgrading supposed to be supported?

No, but people do that anyway (sometimes it's necessary in sid…).

Cheers,
       Sven