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

Scott Ritchie scott at open-vote.org
Fri Feb 15 20:57:18 UTC 2013


On 2/15/13 11:49 AM, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 02:20:46PM -0500, Scott Kitterman wrote:
>>> 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.
>
> Section: metapackages has a very specific meaning wrt the package manager
> (/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01autoremove): any package in this section has its
> *dependencies* marked as manually installed, such that they're never
> accidentally autoremoved.  Care should be taken not to overload this section
> with metapackages that we don't want to have the same semantics.
>
> I do think the existing oldlibs section already covers the 'dummy' case, at
> least.
>

What about actual oldlibs?  It seems like it might be reasonable to show 
those in software center but not show dummy packages, so using oldlibs 
to imply dummy would result in a mistake.



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