[Fedora-packaging] virtual provides for local servers

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sun, Oct 21, 2007 at 10:11:28PM -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Sun, 21 Oct 2007 23:52:55 +0200
> Patrice Dumas <pertusus at free.fr> wrote:
> 
> > What do you think about that idea?
> 
> My immediate reaction is that it adds more and more Provides that tools
> have to process, making things slower and slower.  It also gets us into
> the game of "shortest name wins" once more with these things, but maybe
> that's not a problem per se.

The aim is not to add more virtual provides, but have a consistent
naming for the proivdes such that there is a rule to find out the
virtual provide name. 

My proposal is therefore like:

When a program provides a server listening on a given port, and a
virtual provide for that functionality is neeeded, the corresponding
provide should named server(port_name), port_name being the official
name of the port, as in /etc/services.

> Why don't you work up a proposal on the wiki to consolidate all these
> things like 'web-server' that you want to change to a more commonly

As there is no common naming scheme I can't say what other virtual
provides exist beside smtpdaemon and webserver.

> used server(web), generate a list of all the packages that would have
> to be changed both for provides and for Requires, propose a time for
> the work to be done, etc..  Treat it almost like a Feature page.

I was gathering opinions before doing that.

--
Pat