[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#503367: Bug#503367: plink: file conflict with putty-tools

[Teodor]

On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 6:21 PM, Charles Plessy <plessy at debian.org> wrote:
> Le Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 06:07:11PM +0300, Teodor a écrit :
>> IMO a simple "Conflicts: putty-tools" is enough. If they provide the
>> same functionality than an "alternative" is better than conflicting
>> with each other.
>
> Hello Tedor,
>
> thanks for the feedback, but this would be against our Policy, because the two
> files competing for the same name do not provide the same functionality:

Yes, it seems to be the case. I'm a newcomer to Debian but IMO this
restriction about "Conflicts" in s10.1 seems a little unpractical. The
"Conflicts" section of the policy [1] does not specify anything about
the restriction of packages that should conflict on each other *only*
if they provide the same functionality. The *alternative* mechanism is
the most natural way to handle the conflicts between packages that
provide the same functionality. Otherwise, the "Conflicts" directive
could help for packages that doesn't provide the same functionality.

Thanks


[1]  http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html#s-conflicts