In <[🔎] 20090529013505.GA12317@emurlahn.burrows.local>, Daniel Burrows wrote: >On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 11:21:38AM -0500, "Boyd Stephen Smith Jr." <bss@iguanasuicide.net> was heard to say: >> In <[🔎] 20090528153521.GA31559@emurlahn.burrows.local>, Daniel Burrows wrote: >> >On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 09:02:59AM -0500, "Boyd Stephen Smith Jr." >> <bss@iguanasuicide.net> was heard to say: >> >> Isn't that supposed to change in the future (but perhaps not before >> >> Squeeze) so that we can have versioned dependencies on virtual >> >> packages? >> > Yes. It's been supposed to change in the future for at least ten >> >years. :-) >> Maybe this is a better discussion for debian-devel or the bug itself, >> but what the the technological issues in implementing this? > Adding versioned Provides would affect all the software that tries >to process Debian packages and reason about their dependency >relationships. That's a lot of software, and all of it would be broken >until it learned about the new feature. Not completely broken. I imagine versioned Provides would be rather rare. Also, shouldn't most of that software be using libapt? If someone wanted to implement it, how could they get a list of software to fix? > Also, I don't know offhand of any situations where someone has really >needed versioned Provides -- the main one that comes to mind is when >you want to rename a package that has versioned reverse dependendencies, >and people usually just leave a dummy package behind in that case. Dummy packages solve just about everything. :) But, that does raise the point that I really couldn't think of a good reason to use versioned provides. The best thing I've come up with is being able to state that your package is (e.g.) a drop-in replacement for a package that (a) already has versioned dependencies on it and (b) will be available (and possibly installable) in parallel with your package. (Theoretical example) unishell-1.0.2 is a drop-in replacement for bash-3.2 and ksh-93s. bash-fw Depends on bash (>= 3), iptables It would be nice to have unishell-1.0.2 Provides bash-3.2. Right now, you'd have to modify bash-3.2 to Provide bash3-ui and have unishell-1.0.2 Provides bash3-ui and modify ipmasq to Depend on bash (>= 3) | bash3-ui. Heaven forbid you had another package that depended on bash (>= 3.1~bpo) or somesuch. Might be useful for when projects fork, too. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. bss@iguanasuicide.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.net/ \_/
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