Well, we can't update the packages in the official repositories, but I thought there wasn't anything preventing you from uploading a package with the same name to the extras-devel repo, and promoting it down from there... I could be wrong.

Now, the problem we face is that Hildon Application Manager treats packages from the official repos (though I don't think that includes SDK repos) as sacred vs. the ones in extras, so it will not install upgrades with the same name from extras. I wrote a whole ramble about why I think that's flawed several weeks ago somewhere around here, because it's clearly a relic of Nokia's corporate/business rules imposed on their wrapper around apt, and not in my opinion technically sound. At any rate, I thought apt-get would still happily install the updated versions, or at least would allow a user to do so manually.

So, if the SDK repo is not treated as special, then there's no issue. If it is, then from a user-friendliness perspective, I see your point.

I'd say no. If package A provides a working /usr/bin/foo, it's not package A's fault if package B installs another /usr/bin/foo over that already installed one. I mean, I could apt-get install --reinstall busybox-power, and it'll reset fine.

I'm not sure what busybox-power is supposed to do about this. Put its symlinks into non-standard paths, or divert other packages' files into non-standard paths? For something that touches as many pathnames as busybox-power does, I wouldn't vote in favor of that.

But it's a moot point anyway: I wasn't strongly convinced traceroute("2") should do anything about this to begin with, and after some fiddling with dpkg-divert, I don't think it's really the right solution here - it's unsustainable if many packages started to divert the same pathname...

Haven't gotten a chance to test it. From experience though, I'm going to say "probably".