distro installs

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 2011-11-20 at 00:39 +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> On Sat, 2011-11-19 at 15:01 -0800, Len Ovens wrote:
> > On Sat, November 19, 2011 1:45 pm, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> > 
> > > I'm using a lot of dummy packages. Sometimes I care about dependencies
> > > and versions, in other words, I add that a package depends to another
> > > package version >= x etc. to the dummy, but most of the times I simply
> > > use the names of the packages that should be replaced by the dummies and
> > > don't add anything. In cases when I don't know what I do, I backup the
> > > Linux before I add a dummy package.
> > 
> > That part I figured out. In this case we are talking about a distro. I
> > would think that trying to have two packages with the same name on a CD or
> > worse as a downloadable package would be a problem. We need the right way
> > to do this so both packages can live with each other happily in the
> > repository and get installed at the right time on our system.
> > 
> > -- 
> > Len Ovens
> > www.OvenWerks.net
> > 
> > 
> 
> Sorry, a misunderstanding, seemingly I haven't read your first mail
> correctly.
> Debian does this for Jack. I'm using a self compiled Jack, but Debian
> provides packages for Jack1 and Jack2. There's a package called jackd. A
> dependency of the package ardour is the package jackd. The package jackd
> is a dummy package, that will be installed, if you install the package
> jackd1 or the package jackd2.
> 
> In your case installing one package and installing additionally a dummy
> package is just a workaround. For the distro all packages should have
> the dependency to a dummy package that will be installed, if lib a or
> lib b is installed. This would be the clean solution.
> 
> A dirty solution would be that lib a would install a dummy package
> called lib b and lib b would install a dummy package called lib a.

PS:

Never tested a package that provides another package as it's own (faked)
contend. I suspect there are some rules how to handle things and a
package that includes another package sounds strange, even if this
should be possible. I suspect the best way is to do it as Debian does it
for Jack.