[Followups set.] On Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 09:00:03PM -0500, Craig P. Steffen wrote: > I am prospective DD; as one of my opening packages, I intend to adopt the > sound file editor xwave. One of the bugs against it, 170005, says that > depending on the virtual package "libxaw-dev" is wrong. > > However, reading the debian policy manual sections 3.6 and 7.4, it seems to > me to be a perfectly reasonable thing to do. The real packages libxaw6-dev > and libxaw7-dev exist, and are listed as Providing libxaw-dev. The only > other thing that the policy manuals suggest is that virtual packages be > mentioned in the virtual-packages-name-list.txt. > > So I propose that "libxaw-dev" be added to that list. I disagree; instead, I'm going to kill off libxaw-dev. My decision to use the libxaw-dev virtual package in the first place appears to date back to the time when we had multiple implementations of the Athena library (NeXTaw, Xaw95, and Xaw3D). The -dev packages for these implementations could not coexist with each other, nor with libXaw6's -dev package, because all of them tried to provide /usr/X11R6/lib/libXaw.so for compile-time linking. This is no longer a problem. NeXTaw and Xaw95 have been withdrawn from the distribution, and Xaw3D now uses the shared object name "libXaw3d". The only two packages that will collide with each other now are libxaw6-dev and libxaw7-dev, both of which are under my control. A virtual package is not needed to coordinate between two packages I maintain. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. -- G. Branden Robinson | I suspect Linus wrote that in a Debian GNU/Linux | complicated way only to be able to branden@debian.org | have that comment in there. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Lars Wirzenius
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