Nagy Gabor wrote:
Well, I am not against it neither. In fact, your concept is identical to "provides" imho, with one important difference: With provides, the dependency packages also must be modified (in your example: curl and wget by adding provides=download-client [*]), which simply doesn't work always (see AUR packages, for example). With alternative dependencies, the packager needn't modify wget or curl, so he gets more freedom. In addition, less crap is added to sync database (no ugly provisions).
I think there is a clear difference and that both have their own uses. Consider openjdk6 and jdk. Both provide executables named "java" and "jar" (among others). They behave identically, i.e. they accept the same arguments and do the same thing the same way, or at least they should. A package that needs to use "java" or "jar" doesn't need to know or care where they came from. It makes sense that openjdk6 and jdk should both provide "java-environment" as it is something standardized. On the other hand, curl and wget cannot both provide "download agent" because they cannot be used the same way. They have different names, accept different options and behave differently (wget saves the download to a file by default, curl pipes it to std out, etc). Of course, both can behave the same way with the right options but the package that can use either one needs to know what it's using and adapt to it. The same thing applies to bsdtar vs tar. They have many options in common but they are not identical and cannot replace each other in all contexts. They also have different names. You're right that "provides" require the maintainer of a dependency to update the "provides" array, but any package that implements a standard (library, executable, etc) should already provide that anyway, and "provides" should only be used in such a case. For all others there would be alternative dependencies which would indeed give the packager more freedom.
It should be straightforward to implement, if needed. However, provision-like problems would appear (see the pactests): How to resolve "curl || wget" in resolvedeps? Pick one "satisfier"-package randomly, select the first one, ask user etc.?
I thought the plan was to open a dialogue to select "provides" in the future. This could be used with alternative dependencies too.