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

[Scott Kitterman]

Scott Ritchie <scott at open-vote.org> wrote:

>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

Don't we already have Section: metapackages. Between that and oldlibs,  why do we need more? 

Also, for actual metapackages, I'm pretty sure displaying the depends instead is not what we'd want.

Scott K