Can I add a wildcard dependency to a deb package?

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18712872

  •  28-06-2022
  •  | 
  •  

Question

I am creating a deb package which depends on a long list of packages, all of them starting with aisoy-. When installing with apt-get, I can install them all using apt-get install aisoy-* but if I write that in the control file for the deb package, It fails with dpkg-gencontrol: failure: error detected when analyzing «Depends» field.

My control file is very simple:

Source: aisoy-raspberry
Section: devel
Priority: optional
Maintainer: [omitted]
Build-Depends:
Homepage: [omitted]

Package: aisoy-raspberry
Architecture: any
Depends: [other packages that work well], aisoy-*
Description: All packages needed to install Aisoy in Raspberry Pi

Is there a way of including all aisoy-* packages at once?

Was it helpful?

Solution

It is not possible, you have to be explicit. If you look at the debian packaging library code, the regular expression for a dependency is quite simple: http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=dpkg/dpkg.git;a=blob;f=scripts/Dpkg/Deps.pm;h=449bafb23e782088cdd42e036146230627d05470;hb=HEAD#l593

It only match against a package name containing: [a-zA-Z0-9][a-zA-Z0-9+.-]*

Licensed under: CC-BY-SA with attribution
Not affiliated with StackOverflow
scroll top