Please use packaging meta-data units

[Zygmunt Krynicki]

Hey.

With today's work our providers in Debian automatically generate
dependencies (suggestions and recommendations) based on the packaging
meta-data units. This also works in Ubuntu and (though it's not done
yet) would work in our PPA.

The main focus is to make it easy to understand what kind of
dependencies we actually have and not have to do painful research each
time we have to work on packaging. Instead that knowledge shifts to
upstream work on the provider. The mechanism is flexible enough to let
us do generic (Debian and Ubuntu) as well as really specific (specific
version of Ubuntu only) dependencies.

This is all documented here [1] although for a practical example I
would recommend you to look at the resource provider (which is 100%
correct AFAIK) and uses this heavily in the source [2] and packaging
[3].

The big elephant in the room is the checkbox / kitchen sink provider.
I would really love if we could work on splitting it into more
manageable chunks and even if not, by moving dependencies into
packaging meta-data units. Right now dependencies are both incorrect
and only listed on the actual package (differently in each place, no
doubt as we don't do a good job at keeping that in sync).

[1] http://plainbox.readthedocs.org/en/latest/manpages/plainbox-packaging-meta-data-units.html
[2] http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~checkbox-dev/checkbox/trunk/view/head:/providers/plainbox-provider-resource-generic/jobs/resource.pxu
[3] http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/python-apps/packages/plainbox-provider-resource-generic/trunk/debian/

Best regards
ZK

PS: after writing this I realized that [1] shows the _correct_ way to
apply this to packaging. I didn't realize this and had to re-research
this again from scratch. Talk about RTFD I wrote myself :-)