Re: [Helidelinux-devel] Dependency management for software packaging

[Rolf V. <rol...@he...>]

Bennett Todd wrote:

> Mostly. On my systems, /usr/sbin/sendmail is provided by postfix; on
> other peoples' systems it'll be provided by qmail, exim, or even
> (horrors!) sendmail. Red Hat built in provisions for manual
> provides/requires dependancy tagging for a logical role like "mta",
> which fixes that problem, but AFAIK that's the only place it was
> ever used; it ended up being yet another little one-off hack,
> complicating the package manager while going almost entirely unused.
> I reject that solution.

It can be done in a simple manner.

--
pkg postfix

provides mta
--

Any name that appears in the 'provides' field is added to the list of
installed packages, nothing more. A few lines more in your package
manager. There are some packages that have more than one option: java,
httpd, pop3 servers, etc.

Rolf.