Re: Advice requested with tricky dependencies in records.deb

[Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org>]

>>>>> "Tommi" == Tommi Virtanen <tv@debian.org> writes:


    Tommi> 	This is just something the dependency system can't
    Tommi> express.  The current package approximates that with

It actually can, although I suspect that ftp-master would kill you if
you did it.  (And they would be right in doing so)

So ideally I want sum of products in my dependencies.  Unfortunately
the operator binding is wrong and I get product of sums.  However by inventing meta-packages  I can push things off one level and get sum of products.

I.E. say that  pa depends on (pb&pc)|pd.  You can express that as

package:  pa
depends:  pa1|pd
package: pa1
depends: pb, pc

If it happens that you are splitting your package say into a -common
package and some other package (unlikely in this situation), there are
cases where you can take advantages of this and actually get more
flexible dependencies without committing too much of a crime against
the distribution.  But really dpkg needs more flexible dependencies; I
want to be able to say things like my userspace program depends on
kernel-module-source|(stock-image&stock-module-for-that-image)|(other-stock-image&stock-module-for-that-image)|...
.  There are several other perfectly reasonable situations I've run
into where this style of dependency would be appropriate and useful.

If we implement some more flexible dependency logic soon, we may even
be able to use it five years or so from now.