Control: tags -1 -d-i
Control: retitle -1 "Investigate the use of versioned provides in place of the alternative dependencies in shlibdeps"
Control: severity -1 wishlist
Hi James,
Control: tags -1 - moreinfo
Hi,
On 21/07/18 16:23, Mattia Rizzolo wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 21, 2018 at 02:41:32PM +0100, James Cowgill wrote:
>> If versioned provides was working properly everywhere then
>> possibly it could be used, but I don't think it does yet (although I'm
>> happy to be corrected!).
>
> They do. In the past 2 years many bugs around the infrastructure were
> fixed and versioned provides can now be fully used (in particular, there
> were some last pieces regarding wanna-build and britney, that have been
> fixed ~1 year ago IIRC).
>
> The only thing is that they may be confusing to some, as it's not so
> straightforward to find a virtual package compared to a plain `apt show`
> :>
OK thanks. I'll see what I can do about this after the ffmpeg 4.0
transition has completed.
Thanks for looking into this.
If the infrastructure is in place for this now, and there are upsides with this approach then I agree that this should be evaluated, and the results documented in this ticket. The thing is, I'm not sure I understand the upsides.
Discoverability is indeed a concern. How are users supposed to know what to install in order to get the extra functionality? Will meta-packages (think libavcodec-extra) help with picking up the right package? Does this also work for package upgrades, or are there situations where APT might prefer to remove the -extra variants in favor for base variant?
My main concern with this proposal is the motivation behind it: To support 3rd party packages that have been compiled against a version of ffmpeg that is NOT found in Debian. I don't think this is something we should encourage. In the past, people have asked for help with the ffmpeg package and our reply is typically to replace 3rd party packages with the version found in Debian, which is frustrating, time-consuming and not in anyone's interest.
Dirk, I think the right course of action to get your jitsi backport working is to contact the supplier of the jitsi package, and ask them to recompile the package without the use of 3rd party package archives. Feel free to point them to this email.
--
regards,
Reinhard