On 18.03.19 20:43, Jens Reyer wrote:
On 18.03.19 20:01, Vincent Povirk wrote:
I'm not sure I understand. How is this situation different from any other third-party repository that provides its own version of a package that's in Debian? How is it different from packages in the official backports repository?
The current Wine packages are an example for doing it right: they install to /opt.
Others install to /usr, e.g. some old Ubuntu PPA Wine packages, which causes a permanent flow of bugreports because users can't install official Debian/Ubuntu packages, after they installed the PPA packages some time in the past.
This was not an issue in the past because the conflicting packages were known and added to the Conflicts fields (the alternative solution that I described). You'll see a list of "Conflicts: wine1.2, wine1.3, ..." in these packages. But someday we (Debian) came with our new, not anticipated package names, while at the same time the PPA wasn't updated anymore, and so we have this messed up situation now. I really hope we can avoid this situation.
What I wrote so far is assuming that the packages have different names. If they have the same name you don't have these problems, but you easily run into the problem that an unexpected/unwanted version gets installed.
[Sorry, sent to early] The official backports in Debian do not have these problems, because they have the same name, so only one package can be installed. Normally the highest version of a package gets installed, but the backports repository is configured to have a lower priority which basically says "only install the version from backports if the user explicitly requested that version".
Hope this helps.