VilleSkyttä/VirtualProvides

= Virtual Provides: in packages =

Several packages in Fedora may provide similar functionalities. In some of these cases, it's beneficial to add a "virtual provision" into those packages so that other packages can have dependencies to the functionality they require instead of hardwiring a specific implementation. Note that file based dependencies can in some cases be used instead of these provisions, and can sometimes be "better" than these.

2007-04-08: it appears that these virtual provides and their purposes are not documented anywhere, so this page collects some information based on which they can hopefully be properly documented somewhere later. Feel free to add whatever is missing.

Features that could benefit from being defined as Provides:

 * Browsers that load and use Mozilla plugins from %{_libdir}/mozilla/plugins. File based dependency on the dir works, but causes the need for yum to download file metadata.
 * console web browsers, e.g. links links2 elinks lynx w3m