On Thursday 11 of December 2014 04:48:43 Mike Bird wrote:
The upgrade from 3.5.13.2 to R14 includes a lot of package "renames".
After a clean i386 Wheezy 3.5.13.2 install of kde-trinity is upgraded to R14 RC2, an "apt-get autoremove" removes 48 transitional dummy packages. This is good.
However there are still (roughly) 15 transitional dummy packages whose descriptions say they can be safely uninstalled. All that is preventing them from being uninstalled is two meta packages - kde-trinity and kde-core-trinity. And so the conscientious sysadmin removes the two unnecessary meta packages and the (roughly) 15 remaining transitional dummy packages.
And the next "apt-get autoremove" eats 290 packages which is most of Trinity.
If you had less than a normal kde-trinity installation of 3.5.13.2 this problem hits you much sooner and without uninstalling any meta packages.
What to do? Something in the release notes?
Yes, there is a problem in that packages kde-trinity, kde-core-trinity and kde-devel-trinity are not automatically replaced with new tde-trinity, tde-core-trinity and tde-devel-trinity. The reason is that the previous KDE meta-packages have different version numbers, and they were so far in advance compared to the standard R14 numbering.
As you suggest, this would be good to mention in the instructions for upgrading on Debian.
Incidentally, there are also general comments about the replacement packages during upgrade - for example, replace kpowersave to tdepowersave and knetworkmanager to tdenetworkmanager. This is independent of the distribution. Where should we put these instructions?