[csw-maintainers] Obsoleting packages

[Dagobert Michelsen]

Hi Phil,

Am 09.03.2011 um 21:31 schrieb Philip Brown:
> On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 12:24 PM, Ben Walton <bwalton at opencsw.org> wrote:
>> Excerpts from Philip Brown's message of Wed Mar 09 15:21:57 -0500 2011:
>> 
>>> Errr.. this package seems to have been generated for no good reason
>>> whatsoever. So I'm dropping it.
>>> It would be nice if could eliminate this stuff from appearing in the future.
>>> Or better yet, have something appear that says, "Hey! Rename the old
>>> devel to the new dev please"
>> 
>> Actually, this is the obsoletes mechanism at work.  For users with the
>> old (_devel) package installed, an update will pull this in, which in
>> turn pulls in the new _dev package.  The old is easily identified by
>> /var/sadm/pkg/CSWfoo/obsolete.  In the fairly near future, pkgutil is
>> going to sprout an option to search and destroy on these packages.
>> 
>> The _devel package is empty of real content but provides a smooth
>> transition.
> 
> and do we have a writeup of all this somewheres?

A writeup to have an empty transitional package pulling in a new one?
We always handled renames this way in the past. The only new thing
is that we now have an idiom in GAR to make this as simple as possible:
  https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/gar/wiki/ObsoletingPackages
And putting "i obsolete" with the obsoleting package names is rather
straight forward and done automatically.


Best regards

  -- Dago