Hi! OK. Your example is correct. However the correct managing of multiple provides is difficult. And this will cause more slowdown of pacman (but see my suggestion: collect all provider packages' symlink in local/.providers for example). And what I say that now the _correct_ multiple providing in pacman is missing. Some things: -if you remove a package and a dependency would broke, you must check if there is another provider package of that dependency installed (slow now), the same for update (but this is rare: update056.py) -when you want to -S a provided_package, undefined provider will be installed (an ask from user would be nice) -anyway, there is only one type of provide-dependencies (however, a "virtual" version number may not be useless: webserver 2.0 for example) -and what about the fact that if provide allowed, between 2 packages more than one dependencies can happen (this is not programmed to pacman neither; at least what in the parts what I saw)? -again, my main problem is the efficiency: now there are direct dependencies which can be checked very fast, and the provide-dependency which if you want to check, you must read the whole database to find providers. Yes, I see, that provide is needed, because you have to be able to define a "set of packages" somehow. What I say, that these sets of packages should be store explicitly (not only implicitly). There is not much difference between groups and providers from this point of view. Nagy Gabor