Grouping packages together on-the-fly

[André Dahlqvist <anedah-9@sm.luth.se>]

Hi everyone,

I have often wanted to easily be able to group a number of packages
together to make them into something similar to a task package customized
for my needs. For an example, the task packages for XFree86 contain a lot
of packages that I do not want installed, and therefore I choose to
manually install the packages I want individually. That makes it harder
to keep them all syncronzied when upgrading, and also to remove everything
everything X-related in one go if I want to do that.

What I would like is an ability to on-the-fly group packages together after
my wishes, as long as it doesn't break any dependencies. Is there already a
way to do this, or is this not possible to accomplish? I understand that I
could make some local task packages with the right dependencies, but it
would be nicer if there was an easier way. I'm thinking something in the
lines of this:

/home/andre# apt-get create-group my_mail
/home/andre# apt-get add-to-group my_mail exim fetchmail mutt procmail ...
-- 

André Dahlqvist <anedah-9@sm.luth.se>