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

[Andreas Metzler]

On 2006-04-22 Marc Haber <mh+debian-packages at zugschlus.de> wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 16, 2006 at 10:08:47AM +0200, Andreas Metzler wrote:
[...]
> 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.

Hello,
I do not think so. We introduced these conflicts in exim4-base for
dselect's sake in woody->sarge upgrades. Without the conflicts this
happened:

1. woody is installed, featuring e.g postfix.
2. user changes sources.list to point to sarge
3. user uses dselect for dist-upgrade.
4. dselect sees a couple of *new* packages of priority important and
installs them per default.
5. some of these packages, namely exim4-base{,-config} are completely
useless on this system (postfix is up and running.)

We introduced the conflicts with all MTA-providing packages in woody
to keep dselect from installing exim4-base{,-config} as useless
cruft.[1]

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

Because conflicts should be mutual, i.e. every other MTA package would
need to conflict additionally with exim4-base.

--------------
Policy 3.9
All packages which supply an instance of a common command name (or, in
general, filename) should generally use `update-alternatives', so that
they may be installed together.  If `update-alternatives' is not used,
then each package must use `Conflicts' to ensure that other packages
    *^^^^*
are de-installed.
--------------

The MTA conflict will also work with unofficial (but policy compliant)
MTA packages, a manually set one won't.

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

It's just a symlink.

[1] The original problem does not exist anymore, woody->sarge is done
and sarge->won't suffer from it because exim4-base{,-config} are no
more new, unseen packages of priority important for dselect. Therefore
these ugly conflicts are imho *cruft* today and I would really like to
remove them.
-- 
The 'Galactic Cleaning' policy undertaken by Emperor Zhark is a personal
vision of the emperor's, and its inclusion in this work does not constitute
tacit approval by the author or the publisher for any such projects,
howsoever undertaken.                                (c) Jasper Ffforde