Merge-o-Matic should support package dependency hints

[Evan Broder]

I'm not entirely sure how to phrase this correctly, but it would be very helpful if MoM could in certain cases include packages for "merge" when an actual merge isn't needed.

My specific use case is erlang and erlang-doc-html. Because of weird interdependencies (that I don't fully understand but the Debian maintainer ensures me exist - see Debian bug #558451), the various packages that come out of erlang and the erlang-doc-html package have to be kept in perfect lockstep. Specifically, erlang-{base,appmon,common-test,...} conflict with erlang-doc-html (<< ${source:Upstream-Version}), erlang-doc-html (>> ${source:Upstream-Version}-999). This means that if erlang is synced without also syncing erlang-doc-html, then erlang-doc-html becomes uninstallable.

This has happened in both Jaunty and Karmic (see bug #70745), due to syncs for erlang being requested after DebianImportFreeze, but the corresponding syncs for erlang-doc-html never happened. As far as I've been able to discern, there is no mechanism for automatically detecting these incompatibilities (short of archive-wide installability checks).

One mechanism suggested in IRC to try and automatically detect such package relationships would be if MoM listed erlang-doc-html for "merge" if there was a newer upstream version of erlang that had been synced over already.

[Scott James Remnant (Canonical) (canonical-scott)]

The merge status page is simply a status report of everything currently needing merge or sync. Humans are expected to use intelligence when processing them