#212 Upgrading from real to virtual (provided) packages

[Remi Mommsen]

Hi,

Assume there is a package 'foo' installed. The maintainer decides to improve the package (with a higher version/revision) which is now called 'foo-better', which provides and replaces 'foo'.

Fink does not recognize that 'foo' is out-dated and could be upgraded to 'foo-better'. The user needs to explicitly install 'foo-better', which then will 'upgrade' the outdated 'foo' package with the virtual (provided) 'foo'. It would be nice if Fink would be clever enough to do this upgrade automatically.

Remi

[Daniel Macks]

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The real problem (I think you) are getting at is that Provides are not versioned. There's no concept of one thing that Provides foo being a newer or older "foo" than another. The maintainers of such packages would have to synchronize themselves, and figure out how the versions of foo-better compare to those of foo itself. That's a very old feature request that directly contradicts the whole Debian concept of Provides (and hence we'd have to do lots of hacking to implement it).

OTOH, it sounds like this whole situation is just one of a package changing its name at some point, which is cleanly handled by the fink-obsolete-packages game^Wmechanism. Forget about Provides, just create a real "foo" (higher than the old) that is a Type:bundle that Depends:foo-better, and now the upgrade is all set.