packages: what does | sign mean between two packages

[francois]

What does | sign mean between two packages? For example, as in:
foomatic-db-compressed-ppds | foomatic-db
wget | curl

Thanks.

[brokenman]

This is called piping and in a script it essentially means you want the result of the preceeding command sent to the next command. Is this what you mean?

[francois]

Thanks brokenman.

In fact, after seing more of these packages on package list files, I have the impression that it means that you could use one or the other packag as equivalents.

But I am not still sure.

[brokenman]

Sorry, i misunderstood your question. The 'pipe' in a package list of dependencies means that the package following the '|' is required for building the preceeding package from source. Thus, in your example:

foomatic-db-compressed-ppds | foomatic-db, foo-client, foo-bar

This would mean that foomatic-db is required to build foomatic-db-compressed-ppds. This may vary from distro to distro but in slackware this is the case.

[francois]

If foomatic-db-compressed-ppds is a binary package (.deb), and hence it has already been built, will that mean that foomatic-db, foo-client, foo-bar will be needed to run foomatic-db-compressed-ppd?

Thanks for sharing your knowledge.

[fanthom]

Code: Select all

PACKAGE NAME:  libmatecomponentui-1.4.0-x86_64-1gv.txz
PACKAGE LOCATION:  ./salix/mate
PACKAGE SIZE (compressed):  306 K
PACKAGE SIZE (uncompressed):  1224 K
PACKAGE REQUIRED:  alsa-lib,atk,audiofile,bzip2,cairo,cxxlibs|gcc-g++,dbus,dbus-glib,esound,expat,fontconfig,freetype,gcc,gdk-pixbuf2,glib2,gtk+2,libICE,libSM,libX11,libXau,libXcomposite,libXcursor,libXdamage,libXdmcp,libXext,libXfixes,libXi,libXinerama,libXrandr,libXrender,libart_lgpl,libcanberra,libffi,libglade,libmate,libmatecanvas,libmatecomponent,libogg,libpng,libtool,libvorbis,libxcb,libxml2,mate-conf,mate-corba,mate-vfs,openssl-solibs|openssl,pango,pixman,popt,util-linux,xz,zlib

you can see:

Code: Select all

openssl-solibs|openssl

in PACKAGE REQUIRED field.

i would say that in this case '|' means 'or'.