rpm's treatment of unversioned provides

[Petr Pisar]

On 2011-02-21, Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org> wrote:
> RPM traditionally treats unversioned provides as meaning "any version". 
> Over on perl-devel list, it's been suggested that this is a bug in rpm.
>
> Googling around, I can't find any specific rationale for why rpm does 
> this as opposed to say providing version 0. Can anybody enlighten me?
>
The full story begins on
<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=672246#c7>.

I'm really interrested why RPM dependecny solver behaves like Paul says
and what it is good for.

-- Petr