[arch-general] Depends on foo-bar=10.0-3

[Ralf Mardorf]

Hi,

why does a package from official repositories mentions what version of
a dependency is required? Since the actually optional dependency
pulseaudio by upstream often is required as a hard dependency, for no
sane reason, I installed a dummy package years ago, to workaround time
consuming workarounds. Today I tried to install something and part of
the dependency chain of stuff I don't need is pulseaudio-bluetooth. It
doesn't matter, I'm willing to install pulseaudio-bluetooth, instead
of building another dummy package or rebuilding something. Why does the
package pulseaudio-bluetooth dedicated mentions pulseaudio=10.0-3? Why
not simply mentioning "pulseaudio" without the version?

Note! I'm not asking anybody not to do it like this! I only want to know
the reason for mentioning a version of a dependency, for packages from
official repositories, since I don't know any reason. IOW I only want
to learn.

Regards,
Ralf

[rocketmouse at archlinux aur]$ pacman -Si pulseaudio-bluetooth 
Repository      : extra
Name            : pulseaudio-bluetooth
Version         : 10.0-3
Description     : Bluetooth support for PulseAudio
Architecture    : x86_64
URL             : https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/
Licenses        : GPL
Groups          : None
Provides        : None
Depends On      : pulseaudio=10.0-3  bluez  bluez-libs  sbc
Optional Deps   : None
Conflicts With  : None
Replaces        : None
Download Size   : 50.91 KiB
Installed Size  : 173.00 KiB
Packager        : Jan de Groot <jgc at archlinux.org>
Build Date      : Sat 11 Mar 2017 11:21:44 PM CET
Validated By    : MD5 Sum  SHA-256 Sum  Signature

[rocketmouse at archlinux aur]$ pacman -Qi pulseaudio
Name            : pulseaudio
Version         : 2013.08.18-1
Description     : Dummy package
Architecture    : any
URL             : None
Licenses        : None
Groups          : None
Provides        : pulseaudio
Depends On      : None
Optional Deps   : None
Required By     : pulseaudio-alsa
Optional For    : firefox  fluidsynth  phonon-qt4  phonon-qt5
                  speech-dispatcher Conflicts With  : dummy
Replaces        : None
Installed Size  : 4.00 KiB
Packager        : Unknown Packager
Build Date      : Sun 18 Aug 2013 06:06:40 PM CEST
Install Date    : Tue 25 Apr 2017 02:41:25 AM CEST
Install Reason  : Explicitly installed
Install Script  : No
Validated By    : None