What are virtual packages?

[Jim Byrnes]

On 09/09/2014 02:25 AM, Colin Law wrote:
> On 9 September 2014 03:37, Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> However that package does not seem to be available in  12.04 (it is in
> 14.04).  To check the availability of a package one can run, in a
> terminal
>   apt-cache policy  package-name
> on 12.04 the result is
> $  apt-cache policy  libreoffice-script-provider-python
> libreoffice-script-provider-python:
>    Installed: (none)
>    Candidate: (none)
> showing it is not installed and there is not a candidate version that
> could be installed.
>
> Colin
>

Colin,

I get the same result for apt-cache policy. See my question about it 
being built in above.  Is it possible that uno is providing it?

I ask because I am trying to run some python dialog demos in 
libreoffice.  The ones written entirely in python run ok.  It is also 
supposed to be possible to run dialogs built in the libreoffice basic 
IDE in python scripts.  These are the one that give an error message.

The error message does not point to the script itself, but seems to be 
coming from python itself. This is why I was trying to see if I was 
missing something that needed to be installed. The only way I have found 
to see errors in this case is to display them in a message box so I 
can't cut and paste the error here.  If need be I can type it in here if 
necessary.

Regards,  Jim