Re: Debian Weekly News - June 27th, 2000

[Itai Zukerman <zukerman@math-hat.com>]

> Suppose a package A in Debian provides some functions, and another package
> B in Debian happenly uses that functions.  It is natural for the maintainer
> put the dependency "Depends: A" on his package B.
> 
> Also suppose a package A1 out of Debian provides the enough functions
> to use with the package B, and A1 also has some special functions which
> are essential for some limited users, but the package A can not provide
> these functions immediately because of some incompatibility between A
> and A1, or using totally different language for their code, etc.

It looks like your example doesn't preclude having A1 Provides: A.  If
that doesn't work (because _A1_ is missing some functionality that
other things depending on A require), why not try to get a virtual
package set up, and ask that B depend on that?

Perhaps if I knew more about the real example behind this abstract
one...

-itai