Is it safe to install xz-utils?

[Vincent Lefevre]

When I want to install xz-utils (from experimental) on a Debian/unstable
machine, apt-get wants to remove lzma because xz-utils conflicts with it.
I get the following warning:

WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed.
This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you are doing!
lzma (due to dpkg)

However xz-utils provides lzma, so I don't see what could be wrong.
So, is it OK?

Since lzma has been replaced by xz-utils upstream, shouldn't xz-utils
be essential instead of lzma?

[Sven Joachim]

Post by Vincent Lefevre
When I want to install xz-utils (from experimental) on a Debian/unstable
machine, apt-get wants to remove lzma because xz-utils conflicts with it.

That's the reason why it was uploaded to experimental, I suppose.

Post by Vincent Lefevre
WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed.
This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you are doing!
lzma (due to dpkg)
However xz-utils provides lzma, so I don't see what could be wrong.
So, is it OK?

Probably. The worst case scenario is that it doesn't work and you are
no longer be able to unpack lzma-compressed debs. But that should not
really happen if the maintainers have tested their package.

Technically, since dpkg Pre-Depends on lzma, this means that it could
(theoretically) be not functional during the time that lzma is removed,
but xz-utils is not yet installed. In practice this is not an issue,
though.

Post by Vincent Lefevre
Since lzma has been replaced by xz-utils upstream, shouldn't xz-utils
be essential instead of lzma?

When it finally gets uploaded to unstable, there needs to be a
transitional lzma package that Pre-Depends on xz-utils to facilitate a
smooth transition. But I don't know about the maintainers' plans.

Sven

[Vincent Lefevre]

Post by Sven Joachim
Probably. The worst case scenario is that it doesn't work and you are
no longer be able to unpack lzma-compressed debs. But that should not
really happen if the maintainers have tested their package.

[...]

Thanks for the information. I did the installation (after removing lzip
first, because of bug 540232) and everything is fine until now. :)