On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 6:08 PM, Diego Ferigo <dieghen89@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi guys! I have a propose for pacman/makepkg...Now I'm going to explain my idea...

In AUR there are some problems regarding the dependencies management...Particularly when a package, that from this moment I'll call * subpackage*, is a part of another package, that I'll call *main_package*(example gnome-python-desktop and python-wnck).

It would be nice if the maintainer of the subpackage could add a field * provided* (or another name), that point out to the package that contains it...

Obliviously the 2 packages go in conflict because they share the same files..Now the solution is to add a provides field in the main_package, done by his maintainer...The maintainer of the main_package has to add a new object in provides array, every new subpackage created.

This new field, provided, get the main_package maintainer off to this change, and it give the duty to the subpackage maintainer. I opened a bug some weeks ago, requesting the add of provides= in a extra package, but the problem remained unsolved because AUR and repos are 2 different things.

This method can solve a lot of dependencies problem that happened (to me) in this period...And it is more kiss imho....

What do you think?

I'm not sure I agree. What we have now works well for almost all situations and this new field would add yet some more trickyness to the mix- we already have provides and conflicts, I'd rather not have another. It seems like what we have here is a problem that is best solved at the packaging level, by either of the packages, rather than by adding another option. What good is it to have half of an [extra] package in the AUR? -Dan