The weird package relationships are due to the interaction between historical baggage, Debian Python policy, and the port of the cli to Python 3.
python-foo should only be for Python 2 compatible libraries, while python3-foo is for the Python 3 compatible libraries. Back when python-virtualenv (src pkg) was the only thing available, it also contained /usr/bin/virtualenv, but that won't work now that we want to provide both the Python 2 and 3 compatible libraries. Also, because /usr/bin/virtualenv is shebanged to python3, it also doesn't make sense to include it in the python-virtualenv binary package. The typical solution is to move the /usr/bin script (and manpage, etc.) into a separate binary package, and it makes the most sense to call this 'virtualenv'. Because /usr/bin/virtualenv is a Python 3 script, it Depends on python3-virtualenv. There are use cases for keeping python-virtualenv as a separate Python 2-compatible library that would e.g. be importable. The question still remains: how best to upgrade people who have /usr/bin/virtualenv provided by python-virtualenv in Wheezy, so that they now get /usr/bin/virtualenv provided by virtualenv in Jessie? Using Recommends was an attempt at that, but clearly it's not good enough. Hopefully that explains most of the new arrangement. The only questionable dependency is the Recommends. I'm not sure what better we can do. We should not add a Depends from python-virtualenv to virtualenv (and thus transitively to python3-virtualenv) because then people might get a library they don't care about (i.e. python-virtualenv). virtualenv does Breaks/Replaces older versions of python-virtualenv, but I guess that's not enough either. I don't see how adding a Provides can help, unless we push an update to Wheezy such that python-virtualenv `Provides: virtualenv`. Would that work? If not, I don't really see any other package relationship declaration that we can use to make this upgrade go more smoothly. Suggestions welcome! -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org