Bug#362852: Undeclared conflicts: pathname conflict at usr/share/man/man8/sendmail.8.gz between hula-mta, exim4-base

[Marc Haber]

On Sun, Apr 16, 2006 at 10:08:47AM +0200, Andreas Metzler wrote:
> On 2006-04-16 Justin Pryzby <justinpryzby at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> > Package: hula-mta,exim4-base
> > Severity: serious
> 
> > The etch release policy states that:
> 
> > | http://release.debian.org/etch_rc_policy.txt
> > |       If two packages cannot be installed together, one must list
> > |       the other in its "Conflicts:" field.
> 
> > Both hula-mta and exim4-base include the pathname
> > usr/share/man/man8/sendmail.8.gz, but neither of them declare an
> > appropriate "Conflicts:", which is not allowed.
> [...]
> 
> hula-mta Provides/Conflicts/Replaces mail-transport-agent, which makes
> this an exim4 bug.

Agreed.

> It was introduced in 4.60-2 with
> 
>   * move man pages from daemon packages to exim4-base, add lintian
>     and linda overrides to allow daemon packages not to contain man pages.

Disagreed. If hula-mta provides mail-transport-agent, then exim4-base
should explicitly conflict with hula-mta. We have the infrastructure
to automatically conflict with packages that provide m-t-a, and the
arguments given in the thread following
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/private/pkg-exim4-devel/2003-November/001023.html
(sorry, pkg-exim4-devel archives are non-public, you need to subscribe
to be able to see the archives) are still valid in my opinion.

Why is conflicting with hula-mta a non-sufficient fix?

I find it a bad idea to have the man pages in two daemon packages.

Greetings
Marc

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