Depends/Conflicts question

[Steve Greenland <steveg@moregruel.net>]

I'm working on splitting checksecurity out of cron into it's own
package. (Steve Kemp says "It's about fscking time!"). If checksecurity
and cron are both installed, cron needs to be > 3.0pl1-73, or it will
be run twice. Checksecurity requires either cron or anacron.

I see two ways to express this in checksecurity:

Depends: cron (>= 3.0pl1-74) | anacron

or

Depends: cron | anacron
Conflicts: cron (<< 3.0pl1-74)

The first doesn't work, because if you have both anacron and cron
installed (completely reasonable), anacron fulfills the dependency and
the version issue of cron is ignored (which makes sense).

The second is discouraged by Debian Policy, and seems to cause some
really odd behaviour in apt-get, like preferring to remove (old) cron
and install anacron, even though (new) cron is available and at a higher
priority than (old) cron or anacron, as shown by "apt-cache policy".

Is there a third way?

Thanks,
Steve

-- 
Steve Greenland
    The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating
    system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the
    world.       -- seen on the net