Re: Naive question: boolean dependency

["Jeff Johnson" <n3npq jbj gmail com>]

rpm has never had support for alternation (as in A | B) through Requires:

All dependencies are implictly && (except for triggers which are naturally ||).

What can serve instead of saying

    Requires: A | B

is having multiple provides and virtual dependencies, but

that quickly gets complicated.

There's no real reason why alternation could not be done. I looked

at related issues last May while implementing a compound &&

so that one could naturally say

    Requires: foo.i386

where the N.A form implies that i386 must match in the same package.

I implemented negated dependencies like

    Requires: !foo

at the same time (Requires: !foo is formally analogous to Conflicts: foo,

there is a similar symmetry between Provides: and Obsoletes:)

Likely dependency ranges are more important to implement than having the ability to

specify alternate comparisons. I would have implemented last May but there

was no obvious consensus on what the syntax should be when I asked.

73 de Jeff