Packages that *can* provide essential services (but not always)
I'm currently thinking about packaging Citadel, a next-gen BBS and groupware
system (http://www.citadel.org/).
The problem with Citadel is that it supplies a whole bunch of different
services. You can access it via its own protocol on port 504; it can be used
as an SMTP mail server; it can act as a POP3 or IMAP4 server; etc, etc. It
can, in general, act as a complete mail hub --- but can be configured not to.
The problem I'm looking at is that if my package says that, say, it provides
mail-transport-agent, then that means that it'll conflict with any other MTAs.
But the user might not want to use Citadel as an MTA, and might want to keep
exim instead. What's the best way round this?
One thought I had was to provide a basic citadel-server package, and then have
some dummy packages called citadel-server-mta, citadel-server-pop, etc that
depend on it to keep the dependencies happy. But that seems rather ugly to me.
Is there a correct way of tackling this kind of thing?
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