"ext Graham Cobb" <g+770 at cobb.uk.net> writes: > 1) I had chosen the wrong names for some packages. I have now > created new packages with the new names but it is necessary to > remove the broken packages in order to install the new ones. I used > the normal Debian idiom of specifying that the new packages > Conflicts:, Replaces: and Provides: the old package. apt-get then > (correctly) removes the old package when asked to install the new > package (either directly or as a result of a dependency). Recent versions of the Application Manager do the same (but only for Conflicts/Replaces, not for Conflicts alone). I am being very careful with automatically removing packages in the Application Manager (to resolve Conflicts) since it is easy to remove too many and we don't want to expect the user to be experienced enough to decide whether or not the removal is OK. > 2) Because of the first problem I needed to tell people to remove > the old packages first. But these are library packages and are not > visible (except in red pill mode). If I tell them to remove the > actual user applications involved, the application manager does not > seem to remove the dependencies. They _should_ get removed automatically when they have been installed by the AM in the first place. The AM keeps a list of automatically installed packages in /var/lib/osso-application-installer/autoinst, and when a user package is removed that depends on one these packages, it should get removed as well. If this doesn't work for you, I would be happy to see the details. > Is there a better solution? You can make new versions of the packages with the wrong names that are empty and make them depend on the packages with the correct names. The packages with the correct names can then conflict with the old versions of the packages with the wrong names. Given this setup, the AM should upgrade the wrongly named packages to the harmless empty ones. The wrongly named packages would still be in the system, which is a bit ugly, but if you need the Provides in your renamed packages, keeping them as real packages is actually cleaner, I'd say. (Provides doesn't really work with versioned dependencies.)
