meta packages

[Eric S. Johansson]

I'm wondering if there are any meta packages for things like software 
development.  The reason I'm asking is that recently I built qastrocam 
and I found myself having to hunt down a bunch of packages just to 
compile it.  It would have been nice to have a metapackage for all of 
the core elements such as basic libraries, bison, flex, gcc, etc. etc. 
components so that I could install one thing and get on with my 
development life.  Obviously one could build multiple meta packages for 
different development environments (Java, Python, etc.) if there was 
interest.

If there is such a meta package, where are they listed?

just thinking aloud.

---eric