Comment 4 for bug 228429

> Would you be willing to create a bug report stating which packages are conflicting? It's a fairly uncommon bug ...

LOL.

As a matter of fact, conflicting files happen quite frequently during dist upgrades, in particular since preceding year's KDE packages' quality essentially required the use of PPAs.

Anyway, if conflicting files happen, dpkg should add the package to a list of conflict packages, if the package(s) it conflicts with is(are) also to be updated, and retry them later. Or, in a simpler way, put the package to a list of conflict packages, then if any package has been successfully installed, restart unpacking with this list of packages. This would solve most of the conflicts happening during dist upgrade, because conflicts within the dist are indeed uncommon.

Also impending the stableness of dpkg is the fact that any kind of upgrade through dselect can result in a broken state that cannot be resolved within dselect, sometimes not even within apt-get. Example: upgrading amarok1 to amarok2 from karmic, required some libqtscript4-* packages, which failed due to conflicts to libqtscriptbindings1=0.1.0-0ubuntu1~jaunty1. With libqtscript4-* failed, broken dependancies do not allow to remove libqtscriptbindings1; directly calling dpkg -r and then apt-get install -f is necessary to remedy the situation. Maybe dpkg should automatically store a conflicts between packages when they end up trying to overwrite each other's files. Then at least an apt-get install -f would pick up those and know to remove libqtscriptbindings1 by itself.

If then apt-get automatically does a -f, then a lot of robustness has been achieved that is currently missing.