Hi: This is a stupid idea, and I don't know any case where it might make sense to do it, but it has occurred to me that Policy doesn't mention anything explicitly forbidding it, as far as I can tell.
Lintian allows it through without warning about it. Presumably this is because nobody has ever done something like this before. In the current Policy (a cursory glance at Chapter 7), it's unclear whether it is possible to do something like: Depends: some-library [!all] or: Depends: some-library [all] The latter would, of course, be equivalent to: Depends: some-library I wouldn't know if something similar applies to the third special architecture keyword, 'source'. I guess the reason why there are no warnings is because, according to Debian Policy: "If the current Debian host architecture is not in this list and there are no exclamation marks in the list, or it is in the list with a prepended exclamation mark, the package name and the associated version specification are ignored completely for the purposes of defining the relationships." That means you've got some wiggle room in case we implement new architectures -- dpkg will silently gloss over them if they don't match the current architecture, as it understands "that package/dependency isn't for me" -- a very wise idea indeed. I'm just not sure about the expected behaviour when the "special" keywords (all, any, source) are used. Cheers, Jonathan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
