wine-gecko/mono packages (Re: RFC: reducing wasted disk space from addon files)

[Jens Reyer]

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.

Greets
jre