[aur-general] The Unarchiver and provides field

[Evangelos Foutras]

2011/5/23 Cédric Girard <girard.cedric at gmail.com>:
> Hi,
>
> I'm maintaining The Unarchiver PKGBUILD [1] in the AUR. The Unarchiver is an
> objective-c application for uncompressing archive file. This is AFAIK the
> only free implementation of RARv3 format.
>
> As this application provides an unrar functionnality, does it make sense to
> add a "provides=('unrar')" field in the PKGBUILD? The Unarchiver is not a
> drop-in replacement for the "unrar" command. The binary are not the same and
> the syntax is different.

The provides field can be used to satisfy another package's dependency
on unrar. With that in mind, it doesn't make sense to add it to your
package if the syntax differs and the two packages cannot be used
interchangeably.