[Rd] Depending/Importing data only packages

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 7 December 2013 at 13:58, Gábor Csárdi wrote:
| 'RequireOneOf' would be indeed useful.

The DESCRIPTION file follows Debian Control File formats. Another aspect of
these could be useful here: the '|' operator. Eg for ess (the Debian package)
we have

  Depends: dpkg (>= 1.15.4) | install-info, emacs23 | emacs22 | emacs21 | emacsen

saying that either a recent enough dpkg [package tool] or the install-info
package are needed [to deal with .info files] and that one of the available
emacs versions will do, with the first one being the default choice and the
last one a virtual package providing a catch-all fallback.

The R package does similar things to pick one of several blas and lapack
packages:

  Depends: zip, unzip, libpaper-utils, xdg-utils, \
    libblas3 | libblas.so.3 | libatlas3-base, [...] \
    liblapack3 | liblapack.so.3 | libatlas3-base, [...]

Dirk

-- 
Dirk Eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com