Re: Bug#10516: gs-aladdin: Depends on svgalib1 (>= 1.210-1) which does not allow svgalib-dummy to fulfill the dependency
I've missed the start of this discussion, but I'm the maintainer of
svgalib-dummy, and the issue of dependencies came up already several
times...
> Are there other people that would like the dependancy change
>
> - Depends: svgalib1 (>= 1:1.2.10-2)
> + Depends: svgalib1 (>= 1:1.2.10-2)|svgadummy
This would indeed be a fix for the dependency stuff, but only for the
package that adds this |svgadummy. To fix the svgalib/svgalib-dummy
problems with way, every depending packages would have to be changed
similarily.
svgalib-dummy indeed has a "Provides: svgalib", but unfortunately this
doesn't have any effect... Since svgalib is a shared lib, all packages
depending on it depend on >= some version. And such versioned
dependencies can't be fulfilled by a Provides: :-((
This is not only a problem for svgalib-dummy (which can't really be
used as a proper substitute for svgalib due to this), but it has also
other implications: We'll never be able to replace or rename a shared
library package! Currently, packages that are to replace an older one
(renaming is a special case of this) have fields Replaces: and
Provides:. But this works only as long as no other package has a
*versioned* dependency on the package to be replaced.
I see this as a kind of shortcoming of the dependency checking: It
should be allowed to have versioned Provides: fields also (e.g.:
"Provides: svgalib1 (1:1.2.10-2)". With that, you also give the
version of the other package whose functionality is provided, and some
dependency (e.g. "Depends: svgalib1 (>= 1:1.2.10-1)") can be
fulfilled.
I don't know how difficult this would be to implement in dpkg, but it
would be a win not only for svgalib-dummy, but also for the future, in
case we'll need to replace a shlib package sometimes...
Roman
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