Re: Bug#99835: seemingly useless and ill-conceived "meta" packages

[Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>]

Anton Zinoviev wrote:
> Reading the posts in debian-policy I had an impression that the override
> mechanism is only a temporary solution.  If it isn't then the task
> `Printing' doesn't need meta-magicfilter.

We don't know if it will be temporary or not.

> > My main beef with the meta-* packages is that they seem to create a bad
> > predicent that is likely to prove very confusing to users. I'm all for
> > meta packages, but only if they do not have meta- in their name.
> 
> BTW, using meta- helps finding metapackages.

Why should I, as a Debian user, care whether a package is a metapackage or
not?

Using the meta- prefix makes it much harder to intuitively install a
package. It adds the extra step of requiring the user to check to see if
the package has been split up to the point where it requirs a metapackage.
It's much better to just apt-get install magicfilter (or mozilla, or
navigator, or whatever), and get what you asked for, whether it's a meta
package or not.

-- 
see shy jo