Re: How to write Build-Depends

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Fri, Nov 01, 2002 at 02:22:52AM +0900, Hidetaka Iwai wrote:
> I have a question about writing Build-Depends. When I made local deb
> packages, I referred to kdebase source(kdebase-2.2.2) and the contents
> of the Build-Depends confused me.  For example, we can find "zlib1g-dev
> | libz-dev" in debian/control in kdebase.  I think "libz-dev" is a
> virtual package, but I can't find it in virtual-package-names-list.txt
> from cvs.debian.org(it must be the latest version of
> virtual-package-names-list.txt).  Could anyone tell me other materials
> written about virtual packages, or explain this phenomena? 

Virtual packages are defined by the Provides: fields in package control
files. The virtual-package-names-list.txt file in policy is simply a
list of some of the more common ones.

  $ dpkg -p zlib1g-dev
  Package: zlib1g-dev
  Priority: optional
  Section: devel
  Installed-Size: 360
  Maintainer: Mark Brown <broonie@debian.org>
  Architecture: i386
  Source: zlib
  Version: 1:1.1.4-6
  Provides: libz-dev
  Depends: zlib1g (= 1:1.1.4-6), libc6-dev | libc-dev
  Conflicts: zlib1-dev
  Filename: pool/main/z/zlib/zlib1g-dev_1.1.4-6_i386.deb
  Size: 216600
  MD5sum: 80532d2bdd8e1d11eab20d5f760d06dc
  Description: compression library - development
   zlib is a library implementing the deflate compression method found
   in gzip and PKZIP.  This package includes the development support
   files.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]