Hey, would it be unreasonable to add a "provides: less" or something along those lines to the packaging for busybox power, including all of the other utilities that busybox provides? Because I'm getting rather tired of having packages insist that they /must/ install packages that our busybox provides, for example the aforementioned less command. (Like really, why does the packaging for git insist that it needs less? And/or nano of all things? In all my life of using git, nano has never been necessary. Admittedly the latter is nothing to do with busybox, power or otherwise, I'm just lightly venting now... but that's a separate topic.)
Thanks for your PM and support. Adding the 'provides' in our packaging is a tricky issue, one I've pondered about on several occasions before. By adding the provides, installing unnecessary dependencies for other applications could be avoided. However, most of busybox' utilities don't provide all of the functionality of their (GNU) counterparts. For example, if busybox-power would provide 'adduser' and package XYZ depends on 'adduser', package XYZ could fail because it uses some (obscure) parameter not supported by busybox' adduser. Compare the output of adduser --help and busybox adduser --help and see for yourself. I therefore always erred on the safe side and didn't declare the provides. From a user's perspective, I think it's better to just install package XYZ's dependencies which may or may not be actually necessary when you got bb-power than to take the aforementioned risk (which the user may not be aware of) for the sake of saving some space. Besides, I know at least one user who would very vocally oppose against the idea of having 'messybox' posing to provide (GNU's) full utilities ;-). Another option would be to generate dummy packages that just contain a provide line and depend on busybox-power (e.g. busybox-power-adduser), but I'm not really a fan of putting those in the repos. I could, however, generate those and put them up at busybox-power's garage page and link to them from our thread at TMO; they won't ever need to be updated anyway. Power users could then cherry pick those debs they are sure of will provide everything package XYZ depends on. Or the really brave could do a dpkg busybox-power-* ;-).