On Thu, Jun 22, 2000 at 08:34:41AM -0500, Bryan Paxton wrote:
FYI, RPM does support this. It's a matter of the person making the
.spec file to implement it, but it is supported.
> Package: mutt
> Version: 1.2-1
> Priority: standard
> Section: mail
> Maintainer: Marco d'Itri <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> // pay attention to the depends
> Depends: libc6 (>= 2.1), libncurses5, mail-transport-agent
> Recommends: mime-support
> Suggests: urlview, ispell, gnupg | pgp | pgp5i
> Conflicts: mutt-i
> Provides: mail-reader
> Replaces: mutt-i
> Architecture: i386
> Filename: dists/unstable/main/binary-i386/mail/mutt_1.2-1.deb
> Size: 1015432
> MD5sum: 04e5cf7f387aab4da285e57fe9d5cab2
> Description: Text-based mailreader supporting MIME, GPG, PGP and threading.
> installed-size: 2331
>
> Ok so if you look at the dump for sendmail you'll see
> Provides: mail-transport-agent
>
> This is entered into the status file(DB) for dpkg basically saying that there
> is an MTA installed.
> Now look at the deps for mutt
>
> Depends: libc6 (>= 2.1), libncurses5, mail-transport-agent
> So when you go to install mutt dpkg reads the status file and finds that you
> have an MTA installed that deps on that end are met cleanly.
>
> Now what's so great about this ?
>
> Well for the postfix show dump it'd pretty look the same and have another line
> Provides: mail-transport-agent
> This way if you can be general about deps. Or here's a better way to look at it
> an rpm spec file for mutt would prolly have a line something like this:
> Requires: sendmail
>
> This is nasty because you can only specify one MTA. Of course you could overide
> this with --nodeps, but breaking deps a lot of times will fubar something up
> completely. Anyway you get the picture.
>
> This is the only part of the .deb control file I wanted to cover in this post
> since it's the most valuable part of dpkg that could be implemented into RPM.
>
> There are other aspects of dpkg/deb that could(and once again should IMHO) be
> implemented into rpm, but I just wanted to take a in depth look at this part
> of dpkg.
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