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

[Jens Reyer]

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.