Re: grouping of alternative depends
On Mon, Mar 30 2009, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 11:41:22AM +0100, Holger Levsen wrote:
>> I'd like to use a depends like "(pdns-backend-ldap pdns-recursor) | bind9" but
>> afaik this is not possible. AFAICS I should file a wishbug against dpkg but
>> as I dont have time atm to dig through all the bugs against dpkg, I thought I
>> drop a mail here, in the hope that someone will point me to an already
>> existing bug or if not, just submit this. TIA.
>
> The solution to this and similar problems are always, as pointed out
> by specific solutions in this thread by others, to turn your
> dependency formula into conjunctive normal form (CNF) [1], which is
> always possible, though possibly ugly, as you observed.
>
> Note that if you want to go the "wishlist bug" path however, the bug
> should not be against dpkg, but rather against policy. The reason
> being that policy currently only allows dependency formulae in
> conjunctive normal form.
And that bug on policy would have to show more reason than "I do
not find it pretty enough" to show why we need to modify policy, and
perhaps add complexity to code that parses the depends lines (these are
not just dpkg and friends; our users may have wrotten scripts, as I
have, to help satisfy dependencies while building other packages).
Unless a functional lack is demonstrated, and it can be shown
that the functional lack actually has benefits in real life packages
(apart from it looking prettier), I suggest the policy wishlist bug be
thought about.
manoj
--
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Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
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