Re: Debian Weekly News - June 27th, 2000
Hi.
In article <[🔎] 87wvj57svx.fsf@matt.w80.math-hat.com>,
at 1 Jul 00 15:49:22 GMT,
on Re: Debian Weekly News - June 27th, 2000,
zukerman@math-hat.com (Itai Zukerman) writes:
> > 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.
dpkg had not support versioned provide, while the dependent packages
often have versioned depends line. If the package B depends the limited
version of A, A1 with "Provides: A" can not provide the required dependency
for the package B. In this case, the package B can not be used with A1
even if the A1 has the required functions for B completely.
> 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?
In order to use the outsided package which conflicts/replaces the official
Debian package ? Well, You can try to do it. We thought that before doing
that, we should register our pacakges as the Debian proper packages (not
outsided ones).
> Perhaps if I knew more about the real example behind this abstract
> one...
For slink, users who needs Japanese language support may need to use
the special ja packages for man-db, gs, mh, sgml-tools, Xservers with
the X-TT truetype support, and others from add-on JP packages.
These packages had not been integrated as the Debian proper packages
at that time, and all of them can have difficulties with the versioned
dependency theoretically. (Now we have integrated many of them with
the Debian proper packages, so we hopefully think the probability of
difficulties is lowered for them.)
--
Taketoshi Sano: <sano@debian.org>,<sano@debian.or.jp>,<kgh12351@nifty.ne.jp>
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