Re: Naive question: boolean dependency

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

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