On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 11:21:38AM -0500, "Boyd Stephen Smith Jr." <b...@iguanasuicide.net> was heard to say: > In <20090528153521.ga31...@emurlahn.burrows.local>, Daniel Burrows wrote: > >On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 09:02:59AM -0500, "Boyd Stephen Smith Jr." > <b...@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? > > It seems like it should be a fairly simple enhancement to the resolver with > the caveat that only versioned Provides can satisfy a versioned dependency. > (The alternative of "synthesizing" a version for non-versioned Provides > seems like a recipe for breakage.)
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. 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. I think that's the main reason it was never implemented, TBH -- there doesn't seem to be a really pressing reason to add that particular curlicue to the package system. It's aesthetically displeasing that it's missing, but it's not hurting us in ways that would justify breaking everything that ever has to do computations on package dependencies (not just the apt dependency solver). Please note, I'm just an interested observer. I didn't make any of the relevant decisions or participate in discussions regarding this. I may have read some email threads in 1999 about this topic. Daniel -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
