Bug#717076: libjpeg draft resolution

[Kurt Roeckx <kurt@roeckx.be>]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 06:00:04PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Kurt Roeckx <kurt@roeckx.be> writes:
> 
> > My understanding is that the point of virtual packages is so that
> > several *can* provide it.  But you're now telling 1 package that it
> > can't do that, while you instead could say only one (other) package can
> > do it in this case.
> 
> That's one use of virtual packages.  However, that's not the primary use
> of virtual packages for -dev packages.  As a general rule, we do not want
> multiple packages in the archive providing the same -dev package name,
> because that leads to nondeterministic builds for any package that
> Build-Depends on the virtual -dev package name, and nondeterministic
> builds are bad.

And I believe the buildds don't even allow it.  At least we wants
to have that fail but I'm not sure it's still the case.

So I keep with my suggestion that you say only 1 package should be
providing it instead of saying 1 shouldn't provide it.


Kurt