Re: Deb structure - general question

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@pasteur.fr>]

On Sunday 22 November 1998, at 14 h 9, the keyboard of "Brian S. Julin" 
<bri@mojo.calyx.net> wrote:

> On this note -- Arto is right that we are hard pressed to standardize
> source packages given the diversity of technique used in writing code.
> Adding source dependencies deserves thought and can be acheived,
> despite the complexities 

For the "source dependency" issue, I suggest a simple solution. Invent a pseudo-package named, say, "UNKNOWN-OR-UNEXPRESSABLE" and make every source package with "bizarre" dependencies depend on it. 

I assume that most of the source packages will have simple requirments (perl, eperl, gcc, libc6-dev, a few -dev, etc) and dependencies will be simple to express. For the others, the pseudo-package is a simple way to say "Troubles should be expected here" and automatic tools, such as those who recompile everything on the 68k machines, will know to give in here.