Do you have any other suggestions on how to programattically decide what choice out of many options you'd use to satisfy a dep?
fooz barz billy go
All of these virtually provide /usr/bin/whizbang and use alternatives to handle this.
bingo requires /usr/bin/whizbang, and doesn't care which one. What way to you decide which to grab? Currently yum does a sort of all that provide /usr/bin/whizbang and picks the one at the top. Shorter names sort before longer ones, so in this case, 'go' wins.
-- Jesse Keating Release Engineer: Fedora
One possibility would be to prompt the user, once alternative package choices appear and to let him pick one of them.
Btw, at the time I had posted my bug report, "Extras" and "Core" were disjoint entities, and I was surprised/annoyed that a package from "Extras" got installed when there were equivalent packages available in "Core". So , in this case, I would have expected "Core" to have priority over "Extras" which appears rather reasonable to me.