installing a package that wants the "wrong" java

[Florian Diesch]

"Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday at crashcourse.ca> writes:

> On Tue, 29 Jun 2010, Florian Diesch wrote:
>
>> If you use "sun-java6-sdk | java6-sdk" as dependency the package
>> manager will accept any package providing java6-sdk and install
>> sun-java6-sdk if no package providing java6-sdk is already installed
>
>   just to be clear, is that *precisely* what that expression means?
> i'm used to the standard "OR" operator being commutative so if i was
> reading that expression from a position of pure ignorance (not a
> far-fetched notion), i would interpret that as one or the other, and
> it didn't matter which.

The dependency is met if one or the other is installed.  If the
dependency is *not* met the first package gets installed to resolve
this.

This is often used when declaring dependencies on virtual packages, see
e.g. the dependencies of mailman (debconf-2.0, mail-transport-agent and
httpd are virtual packages). Otherwise apt can't resolve the dependency
automatically.


   Florian
-- 
Simple dict-like Python API for GConf:
<http://www.florian-diesch.de/software/easygconf/>