On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 5:01 PM, Daniel Holth <dholth@gmail.com> wrote:
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0314/ says:
      The most common use of this field will be in case a package name
      changes, e.g. Gorgon 2.3 gets subsumed into Torqued Python 1.0.
      When you install Torqued Python, the Gorgon package should be
      removed.
      
      Example:

          Obsoletes: Gorgon
They mean pretty much what the same words mean in RPM and do not need further bikeshedding.
The problem is that the above *makes no sense*. "Torqued Python" and "Gorgon" are veiled pseudonyms for Twisted and Medusa.... and Twisted is not actually a plug-and-play substitute for Medusa, AFAIK.

Can anybody suggest an *actual* use case for "Obsoletes", and explain how it is supposed to work in software? The last time this discussion came up, nobody had any use cases that stood up to the "how's that actually going to work and/or help?" test. Here's a post of mine summarizing this and related points in the previous thread:

Again I didn't write any of this.

Someone mentioned ZODB + transaction. The PEP should have used the word "merged" instead of "bundled". When two packages become one, and the redundant package is no longer being developed, Provides-Dist can be used.

I re-named a package once just because I did not like the name. I used "Obsoletes" for that. It is documentation.