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A new way to specify versionned dependencies may be needed



Hi,

One package of mine needs to conflict with a few consecutive versions 
of a package. Let's say that the package foo introduced a feature that 
conflicts with my package in version A and removed it in version B.

So I'd like my package to conflict with versions A to B of foo. I tried 
to specify it with "Conflicts: foo (>> A), foo (<< B)" but, as I feared, 
it does not work since it now conflicts both with all versions >> A and 
with all versions << B (as A << B, that means all versions).

Is there a way to specify such a conflict? Listing all the versions 
would work, but that's not really convenient... Any suggestion is 
welcome.

Hence, I think a new way to specify versionned relationship between 
packages might be useful. For example, the conflict I need might be 
written as "Conflicts: foo (>> A, << B)". Is such a feature planned for 
the future? It's certainly too late to have something for sarge, so it 
certainly won't be implemented before sarge+1, and we won't be able to 
use it before sarge+2.

Currently, there's no need for such a feature for positive dependencies 
(Depends, Recommends and Suggests), because there is a workaround:
"Depends: foo (>> A), foo (<< B)" works for "Depends: foo (>> A, << B)",
but it only works because only one version of foo can be installed at a 
time. If versionned provides are ever implemented, it may become 
possible to have several versions of a package at a time, thus breaking 
this workaround.


Any comment?

Nicolas



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