What are virtual packages?

Tom H tomh0665 at gmail.com
Tue Sep 9 12:12:29 UTC 2014


On Mon, Sep 8, 2014 at 10:37 PM, Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

The above is the description of a metapackage like "ubuntu-standard"
or "linux-image-generic".

A virtual package is a package that represents a certain functionality
that can be provided by similar packages. There's no deb of a virtual
package; there's just a "Provides:" line referring to the virtual
package in the packages that have that functionality.

For example, "awk" is a virtual package. If the "tom" package depends
on "awk" and you have either "gawk' or "mawk" installed, that
dependency's satisfied.




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