What are virtual packages?

[Robert Heller]

At Mon, 08 Sep 2014 20:25:03 -0500 "Ubuntu user technical support,  not for general discussions" <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> wrote:

> 
> Utunbu 12.04 & libreoffice 3.5..
> 
> I am trying to run some example libreoffice python scripts and getting 
> errors.  Google suggests that one possible reason is that 
> libreoffice-script-provider-python is not installed.  It is not listed 
> in Synaptic.  This page [1] says that it is a virtual package provided 
> by python-uno.  Does this mean it is "built in"?

A 'virtual package' is a package that does not install any files itself, but
instead is dependent on some related 'set' of packages. That is, when you
install it, apt-get (or aptitude) installs a group of packages. It is a
convience hack. Rather than tell people:

apt-get install foo bar baz whatever mumble liba libb libq

you can instead tell people:

apt-get install interesting-package

'interesting-pacakge' lists foo, bar, baz, whatever, mumble, liba, libb, and 
libq as packages it depends on.

> 
> [1] 
> http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=libreoffice-script-provider-python
> 
> Thanks,  Jim
> 
> 

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