[csw-maintainers] Incompatible packages? Musing about mtr and mtr-tiny

[Sebastian Kayser]

Hi,

what's the current stance on incompatible packages? We currently have
"mtr" in it's GUI version in the catalog which pulls in the whole g* and
X11 chain. I would like to update it and also release an additional,
non-GUI package (with a reduced dependency chain) as "mtr-tiny" and set
it to incompatible with "mtr". The binary name in both cases is the same
"mtr".

That's the way Debian does it. When one had installed "mtr-tiny" and
then installs "mtr" apt-get/aptitude will uninstall "mtr-tiny" first
(and vice versa). Simple solution, no dangling symlinks like it just
happened with sudo and it's package variants. On servers one usually
just installs "mtr-tiny" and doesn't need any X.

Do pkg-get/pkgutil support the concept of incompatible packages at all,
i.e. would they uninstall an incompatible package before installing the
new one? I remember, there were some reservations against incompatible
packages because of "pkg-get install all". To cut a long story short:
can we do the same as the Debian folks do or do we have another way to
achieve what I need to do?

Sebastian