If the administrator tries to upgrade or downgrade a package in such a
way as to violate another package’s dependencies, dpkg does nothing to
stop him or her.

You can try it:

 1. Build packages packagea_1_<arch>.deb and packageb_1_<arch>.deb,
    such that packageb Depends: packagea (<= 1).

 2. dpkg -i packagea_1_*.deb packageb_1_*.deb

 3. Build a new version, packagea_2_<arch>.deb.

 4. dpkg -i packagea_2_*.deb

dpkg won’t complain.

I suggest updating the checks when configuring and unpacking a package
to take dependencies and pre-dependencies of installed packages
(respectively) into account.  Fixing this would make downgrading
packages safer.

What do you think?
Jonathan

forcemerge 20471 573082
thanks

Yes we want that, but another bug is not needed it's a very old one that is
marked as important, it has a preliminary patch by Ian Jackson but it
doesn't work suitably yet.

See #20471 for details. Your help is welcome if you feel like tackling
this one. :-)

Cheers,

On Mon, 8 Mar 2010 21:57:09 +0100 Raphael Hertzog wrote: > forcemerge 20471
573082 > thanks > > On Mon, 08 Mar 2010, Jonathan Nieder wrote: > > I
suggest updating the checks when configuring and unpacking a package > > to
take dependencies and pre-dependencies of installed packages > >
(respectively) into account. Fixing this would make downgrading > >
packages safer. > > > > What do you think? > > Yes we want that, but
another bug is not needed it's a very old one that is > marked as
important, it has a preliminary patch by Ian Jackson but it > doesn't work
suitably yet. > > See #20471 for details. Your help is welcome if you feel
like tackling > this one. :-) > > Cheers, > -- > Raphaël Hertzog > > Like
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