RFC: Making gir1.2-* bundles Provide all their canonical names

[Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org>]

Some packages bundle several related GIR modules, for example
gir1.2-glib-2.0 and gir1.2-gtk-*. At the moment Lintian can't understand
this structure, and issues warnings.

I'm tempted to modify the Lintian check to do this:

* If gir1.2-foo-1.0 contains Bar-2.0.typelib and has
  Provides: gir1.2-bar-2.0, then don't emit
  typelib-package-name-does-not-match for it

* If libfoo-dev contains Bar-2.0.gir and Depends on gir1.2-foo-1.0,
  and gir1.2-foo-1.0 is being processed in the same batch of packages,
  and gir1.2-foo-1.0 has Provides: gir1.2-bar-2.0, then don't emit
  gir-missing-typelib-dependency for it

and include that convention in the g-i mini-policy.

Then (for example) gir1.2-gtk-3.0 would gain

Provides: gir1.2-gdk-3.0 (= ${binary:Version}),
          gir1.2-gdkx11-3.0 (= ${binary:Version})

which would silence the warnings. What do people think of that plan?

(This would also mean that if maintainers look at their GIR dependencies
without knowing which packages have special cases, and add a dependency
like Depends: gir1.2-gdk-3.0 (>= 3.24), the right thing would happen.)

    smcv