can't install arping due to conflicts with iputils-arping

[SB Tech Services]

This bug needs to be raised against the arping and iputils-arping packages.

arping and iputils-arping both provide a binary called arping.

It is impossible to install arping as iputils-arping conflicts with arping (and many other packages do as well)

arping provides capabilities that iputils-arping does not including pinging a mac address among other things.

As the 2 versions of arping use conflicting options and offer different functionality they should not both have the same name.

Even worse ifupdown-extra depends on arping while the iputils-* requires iputils-arping.
This results in ifupdown-exta being uninstallable on a standard desktop system (network manager depends on iputils-arping)

There are a number of bugs around regarding this, some dating back over 10 years.
eg:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/arping/+bug/833546

Perhaps it is time for the two maintainers to merge their projects to solve this for ever, or at least rename one of them.
simple solution would be rename arping package and binary to arp-ping

This system is Mint17 but this issue exits on all debian based systems and probably other distros as well.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.