Broken APT -- how to fix this?

[Colin Watson]

On Sat, Dec 03, 2022 at 12:21:30AM +0100, Ralf Mardorf via ubuntu-users wrote:
> OK, the reason probably was that a renamed dependency contained equal
> named files, hence to not break dependencies either the new or the old
> packages were required, but installing the new packages with different
> names required to remove the old packages first.

Perhaps; there are various reasons why files might have been moved
between packages, not all of which involve completely renaming a
package.  Or it might just be somebody shipping the same files in two
different packages by mistake.

> To work around such a dependency cycle, the maintainers of the third
> party repository probably should have used transitional packages.

I'm afraid this is nonsense.  Transitional packages are of no help for
moving files between packages; the correct solution normally involves
the Replaces field.

(This is of no help to the person who posted this thread, in any event.
But I wanted to correct this misconception in case it leaks into some
kind of incorrect packaging lore somewhere.)

-- 
Colin Watson (he/him)                              [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]