Bug#608655: scotch and gbase: error when trying to install together

[Marcos Marado]

Hi there,

On Monday 03 January 2011 21:48:45 Josip Rodin wrote:
> > The problem is in scotch, that changed all the binary names from
> > scotch_$binary to just $binary (see [1]).
> >
> > The "gbase" in scotch is completely different than the one from the gbase
> > package. My first idea would be to just revert the gbase name change on
> > scotch, but looking at gbase on debian... It hasn't been updated,
> > upstream didn't release anything since 2007 and is now 404'd. No package
> > depends on it. Popcon shows[2] only 74 people having it.
> >
> > Shouldn't we just drom gbase from Debian, and add a Conflicts just to
> > make sure machines where gbase is already installed don't suffer from
> > this?
> >
> > [1]
> > http://git.debian.org/?p=debian-science/packages/scotch.git;a=commitdiff;
> >h=00d7dad1884e5db6bd6995cb9e5c21c76c989705 [2]
> > http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=gbase
>
> I'm not impressed with this kind of a reasoning, when
> http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=scotch indicates an
> analogous number of users (109).
>
> Frankly, I think it's pretty rude of you to show such blatant disrespect
> for the existing gbase user base, no matter what its size.

I am sorry - I sure didn't meant to be rude or disrespectful. 
My reasoning was related to the fact gbase's upstream is dead, but you're 
right - there's no reason why Debian shouldn't keep with both packages...

That said, a fix to this should go to scoth then (and untag this bug from 
gbase), and should be something as easy as re-renaming this particular binary 
and manpage. 

-- 
Marcos Marado