On May 26, 2008, at 12:26 AM, Peter Tribble wrote: > On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 1:18 AM, Stephen Hahn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >> 16. Substitution and virtual packages. A number of messages have >> wondered about making many components interchangeable behind a >> virtual package. The classic example is sendmail/postfix/ >> favourite MTA. My concern is that there's a great deal of cost >> in >> making a key component node "substitutable" in this sense. I am >> nervous about designing centrally about what I think is >> actually a >> very limited and complex class of components. I guess I'll let >> this topic run... > > In most cases, though, the semantic is not a generic "member of class > foo", but "one of the following". As examples: > > An app knows it can send mail messages, using /usr/lib/sendmail. So > it can specify "sendmail OR postfix". (Maybe others - but not all > MTAs can be called like sendmail.) > > An app integrates with the MTA (maybe a virus scanner). The package > can configure itself into postfix or qmail. So "something providing > smtp" isn't valuable, you again have to install one of the specific > MTAs (and possibly specific versions of those MTAs) or it won't > know what to do with it. > > Another common case is a database. Again, most applications > really specify "mysql OR postgres" - any old database simply > won't do. > > -- > -Peter Tribble > http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
This is one feature I am very much after out of a completely different reason. Lets say 3 repositories offer pcre > 4.6. It should be enough requirement to provide a dependency to pcre >4.6 s I do not care where the useer has it from, as long as it provides a pcre > 4.6 version. This would be a good way to make common life easier for multiple large repository projects. Another feature I am missing a lot, which is for sure required by projects that generate their own packages and make their own distributions is to be able to exclude packages from the collection, like the milax guys would probably want the kernel and libc to be excluded from ips updates, belenix wll want other stuff be excluded, and so on. I haven't seen any way to provide forthat .. Just another 2c EUR Michal _______________________________________________ pkg-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-discuss
