Steve Langasek wrote: > The term "metapackage" is a gratuitous label, here. There is a real > binary package (as opposed to a virtual package) in the archive named > "gcc", which comes from the gcc-defaults source package; and its > versions are handled just like those of any other packages.
Ah, silly me. I was only looking in the Sources files, completely forgetting the Packages files. Now there's a first test implementation in place. It reads the Depends and Build-Depends* fields and reports potential problems with those packages. I currently don't handle the arch-specific component of dependencies properly - those are simply stripped. Alternative packages are all checked, but there's a prefix "alternative x/y:" on each line to indicate this. Also, I only use the i386 Packages files so far. Does anyone have a policy-compliant version comparator in Perl that I can reuse? I'm slightly confused as to the exact meaning of 5.6.11. This means some version compares (such as xaw3dg's 1.5+E-1 vs 1.5-25) currently return wrong result in my script. Speaking of xaw3d, I found a discrepancy in versions that I don't understand. testing/main/source/Sources says xaw3d in testing is version 1.5+E-1, while testing/main/binary-i386/Packages says xaw3d in testing is version 1.5-25. How come the source and binary packages have different versions in testing? I would appreciate if some of you tested this and reported cases where you know there is a problem but my script doesn't report it. The results are suspiciously clean, but I haven't yet been able to pinpoint a case which is clearly wrong. The script will not say anything if it finds no problem, but you can use the "show all dependencies" link to see the checks done. The page for openoffice.org shows an example of the output: http://bjorn.haxx.se/debian/testing.pl?package=openoffice.org I intend to inhibit printout if one of alternative dependencies match, but currently all broken dependencies are displayed. -- Björn
