On tor, 2012-03-29 at 14:39 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> > but it breaks down when you, say, want to
> > wrap your egg into a Debian package.
>
> *blink* Huh?
Well, you can't represent that mechanism in a Debian (or RPM) package
dependency. So the alternatives are make it a Recommends and add a
free-form explanation somewhere, or make it a hard Depends, thus
overriding the fine-grained dependency setup.
More to the point, I think any mechanism we dream up here that is
smarter than what dpkg or rpm can represent is going to be useful only
in niche situation.
