On Sun, Oct 05, 2008 at 10:13:37AM -0600, zooko wrote: > On Oct 1, 2008, at 19:10 PM, Tarek Ziadé wrote: > For example: distribution A requires the functionality of ctypes. That > part is statically, declaratively always true. > > However, distribution A doesn't necessarily require a *distribution* > named "ctypes". If you are running on Python 2.6, then that > functionality is already present. If there is a new distribution out > there named "new_ctypes" which provides the same functionality and the > same interface but is a completely different code base, then the > presence of "new_ctypes" satisfies distribution A's requirements. > > The former question is simple, static, and declarative. The latter > question isn't. > > In most cases there is only one implementation of a given interface, so > we make do by equating the interface with the implementation. > > I wonder how Debian and Fedora handle this sort of issue?
I think Josselin mentioned this already for Debian's case, but basically when python2.4 was default packages did say they wanted the python-elementtree package. So when python2.5 was packaged it said "Provides: python-elementree" and all packages depending on python-elementree will now be happy with just python2.5 installed. It's slightly more complicated then that in reality, the full Provides of python2.5 is: Provides: python2.5-celementtree, python2.5-cjkcodecs, python2.5-ctypes, python2.5-elementtree, python2.5-plistlib, python2.5-wsgiref The Debian infrastructure has various ways of helping packages cope with the versioned package names in the above (and it was all still very much a mess in python2.4 times). Regards Floris -- Debian GNU/Linux -- The Power of Freedom www.debian.org | www.gnu.org | www.kernel.org _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
