[Apt-Rpm] multiple good providers, how does apt pick the right one?

[Vincent Danen]

I've got a question here about how apt picks from multiple good
providers of a dependency.

For instance, I want to have meta-packages that are nothing but requires
on packages.  I have a task-mail package which has requires on
imaps-server and pops-server, and this is provided by both dovecot and
courier-imap.

apt isn't letting me choose, however, which one to install.  It's
arbitrarily selecting courier-imap, so it seems to be
alphabetical-based, which is ok, but coming from something like urpmi
where it asks you to pick which package to install, that was the
behaviour I was hoping to get.

For instance, if neither courier-imap nor dovecot is installed and a
user does "apt-get install task-mail", I want it to ask them which they
want installed.  Another example would be for a virtual provides of
"smtpdaemon"... both postfix and exim provide it, but I suspect that apt
will arbitrarily pick exim, which isn't what I want.

Is there a way to accomplish this with apt?

Thanks.

-- 
Vincent Danen @ http://linsec.ca/