dependency of magicfilter

[Atsuhito Kohda <kohda@pm.tokushima-u.ac.jp>]

Hi, I am a member of Debian JP and use potato now.
There is some problems on dependency of magicfilter and gs with
Japanese support (which is in Debian JP at present ;-).

magicfilter 1.2-29 set dependency as follows:

Recommends: lpr|lprng, gs (>= 3.33)

but gs can not handle Japanese characters correctly so we
have gs-aladdin-vflib with Japanese support in Debian JP
and it provides gs and gs-aladdin.
(vflib is some mechanism to handle Japanese characters and is
packaged in Debian JP)

Unfortunately dselect (or dpkg or apt ?) can not handle version
numbers in this case, that is gs-aladdin-vflib can not 
Provides: gs (>= 3.33) resonably.

This prevents us, Japanese users, from installing magicfilter and
gs with Japanese support. This means Japanese users can not have 
printing environment with satisfaction in Debian.

So I wish to suggest some fixes.

- Get changed Suggests: gs (>= 3.33) from Recommends: gs (>= 3.33)

Is it possible to reduce Recommends to Suggests as above ?
I think that the above is the most resonable and practical solution
but there are other means of cource.

- Improve dselect (or dpkg or apt) to be able to handle version
numbers in dependency fields.

- Contribute gs-aladdin-vflib to Debian from Debian JP and get changed
the dependency of magicfilter as

Recommends: lpr|lprng, gs (>= 3.33)|gs-aladdin-vflib

# These are essential fixes but may take a long time.

- Get changed as Recommends: lpr|lprng, gs (without version)

# But this may be impossible by some reasons I do not recognize.

Personally, I hold magicfilter of 1.2-28 which Recommends gs-aladdin
without version so compatible with gs-aladdin-vflib.

How do you think ? I want any comments about this issue.
Or shall I report this to BTS as wishlist ?

Thanks in advance,		1999.5.10

--
 **************************
 Atsuhito Kohda
 Dep. Math., Tokushima Univ.
 kohda@pm.tokushima-u.ac.jp