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

[Scott Ritchie]

On 2/15/13 1:31 PM, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 12:57:18PM -0800, Scott Ritchie wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> No, I don't think it's reasonable to show old libraries in USC.  oldlibs is
> by definition only used for old packages that nothing in the current release
> should depend on and that are only made available for supporting binary-only
> software.  These are not packages that make sense to expose in a
> user-oriented interface like USC; either the packages should be pulled in as
> dependencies of whatever binary software the user is installing via USC, or
> the user is installing their software by some means other than USC already
> and the setup instructions for that non-Ubuntu software can deal with
> guiding them through the oldlibs installation.
>

That's reasonable then, let's just use oldlibs.  I've filed 
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/software-center/+bug/1126695 
for that.