Dependencies on programs relating different DBs

[Gunnar Wolf <gwolf@campus.iztacala.unam.mx>]

Hi,

I am building a package which should be able to interact either with
PostgreSQL (using php4-pgsql and postgresql-client) or MySQL (using
php4-mysql and mysql-client). My first idea was this line:

Depends: (php4-pgsql, postgresql-client) | (php4-mysql, mysql-client)

Of course, life was not too gentle on me, as this is not legal. I did not
want to resort to the simpler:

Depends: php4-pgsql | php4-mysql, postgresql-client | mysql-client

because it could lead to (very unlikely but still existent) problems -
What if the user has php4-pgsql and mysql-client?

A friend of mine came up with a brilliant idea:

Depends: php4, php4-pgsql | php4-mysql, php4-pgsql | mysql-client, postgresql-client | php4-mysql, postgresql-client | mysql-client

Yes, it is harder for the human eye to parse, but it builds the correct
truth values, and apt-get can understand it. Life was good until a couple
of minutes ago, when I ran Lintian on my package, only to find out:

E: tutos: package-has-a-duplicate-relation php4-pgsql | php4-mysql, php4-pgsql | mysql-client
N:
N:   The package seems to declare a relation on another package which is
N:   already implied by other relations it declares, and is therefore
N:   redundant. This is not only sloppy but can break some tools
N:
E: tutos: package-has-a-duplicate-relation php4-pgsql | php4-mysql, postgresql-client | php4-mysql
E: tutos: package-has-a-duplicate-relation php4-pgsql | mysql-client, postgresql-client | mysql-client
E: tutos: package-has-a-duplicate-relation postgresql-client | php4-mysql, postgresql-client | mysql-client

Which means, no matter how elegant it is, it is still not good :-(

Does anyone have an idea on how to make this work correctly?

Thank you very much,

-- 
Gunnar Wolf - gwolf@campus.iztacala.unam.mx - (+52-55)5623-1118
PGP key 1024D/8BB527AF 2001-10-23
Fingerprint: 0C79 D2D1 2C4E 9CE4 5973  F800 D80E F35A 8BB5 27AF


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