Something completely but not quite different:

  Debian seems to distinguish between the package name and the
provided service name: one can have different packages providing
the same service, for example there are sendmail.deb and qmail.deb
and exim.deb, but they all provide "mta".

  Currently we are handling such things by conflicting the individual
packages and have handcrafted logic in dependant packages. That is
neither very flexible nor scales all that well.

  Would that (ie. a PROVIDES variable) be something we want?

	mjl