How about an XB-Meta-Package: dummy package field?

Scott Ritchie scott at open-vote.org
Fri Feb 15 18:10:28 UTC 2013


On 2/15/13 2:52 AM, Andy Whitcroft wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 10:35:41PM -0800, Scott Ritchie wrote:
>> We have (and will continue to have) many transitional dummy packages
>> with no content.  I see two main advantages to flagging them:
>
> Were you proposing something like the below?  Otherwise the name might
> want to include transitional, as there are meta packages which are the
> right thing to use and not going away:
>
> 	XB-Meta-Package: transitional
>
> -apw
>

Yes, I had thought that we might also want to mark metapackages that 
aren't transitional as well, perhaps to prefer showing them in Software 
Center.  Whether we use the tag "transitional" or "dummy" doesn't really 
matter.

So it could be like:
  "dummy" -- no files, can be safely removed, don't display in most 
tools, remove at release upgrade time, should be in oldlibs section
  "meta" -- no files, but depends on one or more other packages, 
possibly prefer showing in software center to the depended packages



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