On Thu, Mar 16, 2006 at 11:04:07PM +0100, bardo wrote: > You're right, and this is where virtual packages are useful: a > specific web server is rarely a dependency for any web app. Having a > "webserver" virtual package would be a great thing, making sure the > "provides" flag is correctly used in those packages.
Even a web-server isn't really required to run php web-applications. fastcgi can be configured to accept TCP connections from a remote web-server. The spamassassin package: It doesn't require "smtp-server". Is it useful without postfix or sendmail? Not for most users. But some use fetchmail. A package should not make any assumptions about how it is used/configured. > However, I don't think it's the same for any specific framework like > php. Here I think we should use the 'provides="php"' for any app that > does this thing. That is because php is the official implementation of > the PHP language, while any webserver is implementing the "generic" > HTTP standard and its derivatives. Quite different, don't you think? Yes. Another good example is python. jython is another implementation of the same language and should be interchangeable with the C implementation. This is where virtual packages make sense. Another good example is "smtp-server", because SMTP is a well-defined protocol. A not so good example is something like ¨sqldb" for packages like postgresql and mysql because they do not provide the same API (like "libgl" implemented by nvidia or ati-drivers). Jürgen
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