Auto Package

[Dmitriy Kropivnitskiy]

On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 16:37 +0100, Mike Hearn wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 09:54:47 -0500, Dmitriy Kropivnitskiy wrote:
> > 1. How do you propose handling conflicts between dpkg and autopackage?
> > For example, gaim is (I think) installed as part of the base install.
> 
> The idea is to integrate with dpkg (and rpm) at install time so apt
> thinks the package is installed. 
> 

So, I understand that in the current version there is no integration
with the native packaging system. That was my point.

> As for upgrades of libraries breaking things, well that is what the
> interface stability rules are for ;) If the Ubuntu/Debian packages are
> patched in such a way that they're incompatible with upstream then it
> might become a problem but hopefully this doesn't happen much (or at
> all).

Sometimes library API is changed by the upstream and newer version is no
longer compatible with the older one. Sometimes application is looking
for a particular version of the library. Sometimes developers use
undocumented or obsolete features of libraries and those may not be
available in newer versions. In all these cases the fault is with the
upstream, but distribution developers still have to deal with these
problems, since they are the ones users are gonna blame. Library
conflicts can cause some very strange and difficult to find problems,
especially since some libraries have rather long dependency chains.