[packagekit] Questions about Get Depends and Get Requires

[Matthias Clasen]

On Dec 11, 2007 1:23 PM, Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-12-11 at 19:19 +0100, Patryk Zawadzki wrote:
> > Unless some other package explicitly lists adobe-flash as the only
> > supported library while the "whatever comes first" resulted in
> > installation of gnash.
>
> Well, if I just ask the backend to choose one, which does it choose?
>
> > Then you get a nice coflict (and a hard one to
> > resolve as it's hard to tell if it's safe to uninstall one package
> > just because some other one conflicts).
>
> Sure, My view is that we shouldn't have packages providing the same
> file, nor have i386 packages on a x64 system, although that's quite some
> controversy right there. :-)

This is not just about files. virtual provides like "smtpdaemon" have the same
problem, and for them it is by design that they can be provided by
multiple packages.
Anyway, when you install a package that requires "smtpdaemon", the backend
certainly applies some heuristic to pick one (e.g. rpm/yum sort by
packagename and pick the first/shortest one). The backend should just
use the same heuristic to determine the list of packages to return as
dependencies.