how to have yum prefer one dependency over others

[Matthew Garrett]

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 02:40:30AM +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:

> We really need a way to be able to specify an explicit default which is used 
> independently of what the user has installed, even if we don't always use it 
> (I can see the case of gnome-* vs. kde-*); the version number of the 
> Provides would be one solution. ("Shortest name" or "first in the alphabet" 
> is just a hack, which forces silly things like using "phonon-bknd-gst", so I 
> don't think that's a good way to make the decision, though even that was 
> better than what we have now, which is almost unpredictable.)

Debian policy is that any virtual dependencies must also have an 
explicit dependency. In your case it would be something like

Requires: phonon-backend-gstreamer | phonon-backend

If the virtual dependency is already satisfied then nothing happens,  
but if not phonon-backend-gstreamer would be used to satisfy it. This 
works fine for package dependencies, but I'd imagine file-based 
dependencies would make things more awkward.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org