[aur-general] Handling of virtual packages

[Pedro A. López-Valencia]

On 20/09/2016 3:12 p. m., buckket wrote:
> Hey,
>
> I’m currently maintaining serval packages on the AUR which are all
> implementations of djb’s redo[0], an incremental build system. However
> there are minor differences between all those implementations, and as
> djb never wrote one himself there is no "offical" one. That’s why I
> decided to give the packages unique names like "redo-sh"[1] and let them
> all provide[2] "redo" in their PKGBUILD.
>
> Coming from Debian I’m familiar with the concept of virtual packages...
[snip]
>
> Regards,
> Felix
>

I maintain several packages that all provide the same software, 
different versions, and therefore conflict with each other. The 
canonical way I've used based on PKGBUILDs created by long-time devs and 
TUs is to add both a "provides=()" and "conflicts=()" pointing to a 
common, usually the main, package version. This is all documented in 
PKGBUILD(1). See the brave browser family for an example.