On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 06:00:04PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > Kurt Roeckx <k...@roeckx.be> writes: > > > My understanding is that the point of virtual packages is so that > > several *can* provide it. But you're now telling 1 package that it > > can't do that, while you instead could say only one (other) package can > > do it in this case. > > That's one use of virtual packages. However, that's not the primary use > of virtual packages for -dev packages. As a general rule, we do not want > multiple packages in the archive providing the same -dev package name, > because that leads to nondeterministic builds for any package that > Build-Depends on the virtual -dev package name, and nondeterministic > builds are bad.
And I believe the buildds don't even allow it. At least we wants to have that fail but I'm not sure it's still the case. So I keep with my suggestion that you say only 1 package should be providing it instead of saying 1 shouldn't provide it. Kurt -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org