A problem with conflicts between a package and an add-on to it

[Douglas Wade Needham <cinnion%ka8zrt.com@localhost>]

Greetings all and Happy New Year!

I have been working on updating some packages for Zope & Plone in
preparation for importing them into pkgsrc-wip, and have run into an
interesting problem.  Since I first created the packages with Zope
2.7.x and Plone 2.0.x, (2.7.5/2.0.5 being my latest prior update), one
add-on "product", BTreeFolder2, which is needed by Plone was moved
into the Zope core distribution.  So now, BTreeFolder2 is integrated
into Zope and required by the same.  Unfortunately, there are also a
few minor changes in the version for Plone, and here is where the
problem occurs.  As BTreeFolder2 is needed by Zope, it would
theoretically be broken out separately and installed before the Zope
package in most normal packages.  But, to install BTreeFolder2, we
need the framework installed as a part of the Zope package, yielding a
circular dependency.  Worse, there are these deltas between the
versions distributed in the core Zope distribution and Plone, and
these have only been tested with Plone installed, and may indeed have
hooks into Plone which could introduce instabillity if patched into
the Zope base.  Ignoring pkgsrc, the intention is that when Plone is
installed, the version distributed with Plone would overwrite the
versions from Zope, but pkgsrc grumbles about this.

So, my question is this...how can one overwrite files from one package
with another, when the second requires the first, without pkgsrc
causing grief?

I know with SCO UnixWare, the packaging scripts were quite capable of
detecting when it would overwrite files, back them up and then
restoring the files when the second package was removed.  Indeed, I
rewrote many of the scripts which are used today for the UnixWare
patches while working at the greater Bell Labs to fix this.  But
pkgsrc does not appear to have this, unless perhaps it is in the
package views, which I have yet to start using.

Hopefully, someone will have an easy solution which will not make me
make the two packages aware of each others contents, or require folks
to uninstall/reinstall (as would be the case with some conditional
variable, such as setting "ZOPE_PLONE=yes" while building/installing
Zope).  In the meantime, I am hopeing that the new versions of Zope
and Plone which are in develpment (2.9.0b2 and 2.1.2) will not have
this problem.


-- 
Douglas Wade Needham - KA8ZRT        UN*X Consultant & UW/BSD kernel programmer
Email:  cinnion @ ka8zrt . com       http://cinnion.ka8zrt.com
Disclaimer: My opinions are my own.  Since I don't want them, why
            should my employer, or anybody else for that matter! 


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