Build-Depends: some-virtual-package (not stating any real package)

[Michael Vogt]

On Tue, Jul 17, 2007 at 11:00:12AM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> acpi 0.09-3 says this:
>  Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 4), automaken, autoconf, \
>                 help2man, dpkg-dev (>= 1.9.0)
> (linebreak mine).
[..]
> This does not clearly imply the requirement that I and mvo thought
> existed.  acpi builds fine with sbuild (obviously) but both apt-get
> build-dep and the machinery used by autopkgtest fail.
> 
> Is the policy inadequate ?  If so then policy should be fixed in
> Debian and acpi needs a fix too.
> 
> If policy is correct then gdebi (used by autopkgtest) and
> apt-get build-dep need to be fixed to permit this case.
[..]

The current implementation in both gdebi and apt-get build-dep is that
virtual dependencies will be satisified if there is only a single
package available that provides this "provides". Its not hard to
change this, I'm just concerned that this will make builds less
predictable because it is unclear to me what package apt should pick
if there are multiple available. I will try to figure out what sbuild
is doing and provide similar behaviour.

Cheers,
 Michael