Bug#761003: autopkgtest: @ shouldn't be satisfied by a virtual package

[Niko Tyni]

Package: autopkgtest
Version: 3.4.1
x-debbugs-cc: debian-perl at lists.debian.org

Reading failure logs of Martin Pitt's recent mass test of pkg-perl
packages [1], there seems to be a problem with testing binary packages
that are also Provided as a virtual package. A few examples of such
packages are libhttp-tiny-perl, libio-compress-perl, and libencode-perl.

I can see that this is probably according to the spec, but it seems less
than useful in our case. The test dependency '@' just gets expanded to
(for instance) 'libhttp-tiny-perl' and a dummy package is generated
that Depends on this. The dependency will then be considered satisfied
by apt as perl-modules Provides it, and the actual to-be-tested package
doesn't get installed at all.

I guess we could work around this by depending on '@ (>= 0~)' or something
to that effect (at least until we start using versioned provides, which
were recently implemented in dpkg and apt.) Is that what we should
be doing, or would you be willing to change this behaviour?

I suppose just having autopkgtest explicitly apt-get install the expanded
name in addition to the dummy package would work.

[1] thread starts at https://lists.debian.org/debian-perl/2014/09/msg00003.html

Thanks for your work on autopkgtest,
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org