On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 5:02 AM, Christoph Berg <cb@df7cb.de> wrote:
I'm not saying we can't change this, though there's some reason behind the way it currently is. Martin, do you remember if that "Provides:" mismatch between server and client was intended, or did we just forget that? Should we rather remove it from the client packages as well?
My familiarity with virtual provides is so that any packages with have a non-versioned dependency on postgres, will be satisfied by whatever version of postgres* installed. It's commonly used when co-installing packages of the same name (different versions). Dependencies that require a specific version should do so in their "Depends" statement.
This convention is already used in the postgresql-9.4 RPM packages, as seen below.
On RPM based systems, this allows one to install postgresql94-server, and later remove postgresql-server. The virtual provides ensure any packages with a postgresql-server requirement remain on the system, after `postgresql-server` has been removed (since the dependency is met by postgresql94-server).