Bug#685029: lintian: empty-binary-package misuses "virtual package"

[Stuart Prescott <stuart@debian.org>]

Package: lintian
Version: 2.5.10.1
Severity: normal

Hi!

Lintian's tag to catch accidentally empty packages (empty-binary-package)
states that the maintainer should include the information that this package
is supposed to be empty in the description:

  N:   If the package is deliberately empty, please mention in the package
  N:   long description one of the phrases "metapackage," "dummy,"
  N:   "dependency package," "empty package," or "virtual package."

The usage of "virtual package" in this way is quite at odds with the normal
usage of "virtual package" in Debian -- a usage which is guided by Policy
§3.6 and is in the output of our package management tools like apt. Virtual
packages don't exist -- so an empty package cannot be a virtual package.
Moreover, there is an authoritative list of virtual packages -- maintainers
don't just add the words "virtual package" to package descriptions.

I'd like to see "virtual" removed from @METAPKG_REGEX and the tag
description. I wondered if a separate tag be added that flags packages that
use "virtual package" in their descriptions, but there are only 16 packages in
sid that currently do that, and only grass, korundum, mediatomb, mrpt-libs,
roxterm, wine, wine-unstable would not be false-positives.

cheers
Stuart