I don't understand. What I say, that if provide is allowed it's possible that if foo1 depends on foo2, then more than one dependencies may exists between
Absolutely there is. I know what are the differences in package management, I said "from this
Hi! 1. I'm saying that nothing is wrong with the current backend, just some needed properties of the database is not stored explicitly, that's why you have to find it with brute force (by reading the whole database)! You say that many small files are bad, but that's not true; you can think of it, that you have extra pointers (directory names) which points to the needed data! My "solution" is as safe as possible and as compatible with the older versions as possible. One more word about speed: it's nonsense that dpkg & apt-* is faster on a 386 than pacman on a P4. I'm _sure_ that if these really small things would be implemented, pacman would be faster (see above). 2. OK. I understand, that non-mutual provide is needed, I'm just lazy :-) And the pathological examples makes the life difficult :-) (Look, I haven't seen two provider package which aren't mutual; and none of my reported bugs was found earlier etc. etc.) them: for example foo1 depends on foo3 too, and foo2 provides foo3. The current pacman doesn't count with this (this is rare, I know.) point of view": they are just sets (for different purposes), they should be managed similarly (in programming; internally) Nagy Gabor