On Mon, Aug 30, 2004 at 08:47:16PM +0200, Marc Haber wrote: > On Sun, 29 Aug 2004 00:39:47 +0200, Sebastian Ley > <sebastian.ley@mmweg.rwth-aachen.de> wrote: > >It is a good idea to explicitly specify at least one package that fulfills a > >virtual dependency. You could view it as the recommendation of the packager, > >if you don't care about the httpd daemon, apt will install apache. > > How will it choose apache? Will it choose apache because it happens to > be the alphabetically first httpd? Or is apache somewhere configured > as the primary target httpd? > > I think that last time I looked at that issue, a package satisfying > the dependency was chosen at random. Lintian will complain "virtual-package-depends-without-real-package-depends", and the maintainer then fixes it. This is supposed to be helpful to the autobuilders, but I anticipate that its also used by dselect and friends. If you install X which depends on apache|httpd, then it will bring up a conflict resolution list with apache selected by default. If you already have a package with Provides: httpd, then you don't get that screen (for that reason). Cheers, Justin
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