Re: gawk as essential...

[Yves Arrouye <arrouye@marin.fdn.fr>]

 > Would we be making gawk nonessential in favor of mawk, or just making
 > gawk nonessential (removable)?  If it's made removable, any packages
 > needing awk will, of course, need to depend on something which provides
 > it.  Presuming that mawk is a fully compatable awk-alike (I've never used
 > it), both the gawk and mawk (and any other packages needing awk) will
 > need a Depends field added to their control files.  It'd probably be
 > best for all awk-alike packages to "Provides: awk" in their control
 > files, and for dependent packages to "Depends: awk".

I think that's the way it should be. Except that we could consider
having awk and nawk virtual packages to depend on, not just awk.

I'm pretty sure one can depend on a virtual package. And packages
like gawk and mawk for example would provides both awk and nawk.
(I'm not sure it is possible to express that nawk includes awk so
that a package providing nawk does implicitely provide awk.)

Yves.