x11-common conflicts with 3rd-party packages
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| xorg (Ubuntu) |
Won't Fix
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
Binary package hint: x11-common
The x11-common package lists several 3rd-party packages in its conflict section.
Packages which do not exist in-distro should never, ever be listed as dependencies.
Two specific packages I encountered conflicts with are xv and opera. After installing feisty, I went to install these, and apt/dpkg refused to even try. The packages work otherwise; there's nothing actually wrong with them, but x11-common's conflict list prevents them from installing.
I realize there may be issues attempting to run old versions of 3rd-party packages on a new Xorg, but listing those packages as conlicts seems like the wrong solution.
Currently, x11-common uses conflicts. This forces either x11-common or the 3rd-party package to be removed. Or, it prevents the 3rd-party package from being installed, so the user may resort to tarballs or other messy mechanisms. For example, my old xv binary runs just fine. For that matter, so does my old copy of Opera. But in order to use them, I have to either modify the x11-common package, convert the xv/opera debs to tar and give up the ability to remove them cleanly, or make new packages with faked version numbers.
Instead, I'd prefer if x11-common simply didn't care about anything outside the distro. The 3rd-party packages may break, or they may work, but who cares? They're not part of Ubuntu, they aren't supported, and Ubuntu shouldn't care. Third-party packages are the user's problem.
| Selene ToyKeeper (toykeeper) wrote | #1 |
| Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton) wrote | #2 |
| Changed in xorg: | |
| status: | New → Won't Fix |
| Charles Stone-Tolcher (c+st) wrote | #3 |
Looking at the full list of x11-common conflicts, I see that the following do not exist in any version of Ubuntu:
- xv
- xftp
- xext
- xpaste
- ghostview
- xephem
These should probably be removed from the dependencies.
Opera seems to be available from the commercial repository, so I can see why it would be listed. I missed it earlier because I didn't have that source enabled.
The feisty-commercial version doesn't work for me, but that's a different issue. Every 9.x version so far has been unusably slow (on a 1.8GHz P4), and it doesn't look like it will ever be fixed. If I bypass apt, opera 8.54 works fine.