[Pkg-telepathy-maintainers] Bug#548779: empathy: libempathy* packages should allow for a smooth apt-get dist-upgrade

[Andres Salomon]

Package: empathy
Version: 2.28.0-1
Severity: wishlist

Hi,

When I attempt to dist-upgrade my sid box to the latest empathy, I see the
following:

dilinger at mycelium:~$ dpkg -l libemp* empathy
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Cfg-files/Unpacked/Failed-cfg/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name                       Version                    Description
+++-==========================-==========================-====================================================================
ii  empathy                    2.26.2-1                   High-level library and user-interface for Telepathy
ii  libempathy-common          2.26.2-1                   High-level library and user-interface for Telepathy (library common 
ii  libempathy-gtk-common      2.26.2-1                   High-level library and user-interface for Telepathy (GTK common file
ii  libempathy-gtk19           2.26.2-1                   High-level library and user-interface for Telepathy (GTK library)
ii  libempathy23               2.26.2-1                   High-level
library and user-interface for Telepathy (low-level libra
dilinger at mycelium:~$ sudo apt-get -u dist-upgrade
[sudo] password for dilinger: 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  empathy libempathy-gtk19 libempathy23
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  empathy-doc geoclue libchamplain-0.4-0 libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libclutter-1.0-0 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0 libgeoclue0
The following packages will be upgraded:
  libempathy-common libempathy-gtk-common libkpathsea4 libtelepathy-glib-dev libtelepathy-glib0
5 upgraded, 7 newly installed, 3 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
Need to get 3,712kB/4,158kB of archives.
After this operation, 4,026kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? 


Apt wanting to uninstall empathy is not ideal. :)


There are a number of workarounds that can be done in empathy to provide a
smooth upgrade.  These include having packages "Provides: libempathy" and
"Provides: libempathy-gtk" (if many SONAME changes are expected, this
probably makes more sense) or listing the old packages with
Conflicts/Replaces.  Libempathy-gtk28 might have:

Conflicts: libempathy-gtk14, libempathy-gtk19
Replaces: libempathy-gtk14, libempathy-gtk19

Likewise, libempathy30 might have:

Conflicts: libempathy14, libempathy23
Replaces: libempathy14, libempathy23