On Friday, August 05, 2011 10:35:11 AM you wrote: > Hi Paul, > > What you want is not a virtual package but rather a meta-package. See > xserver-xorg for example (or texlive or libreoffice) which pull in > submodules from a central package that holds only central information or > even only puts the Depends (like the gnome and gnome-desktop-environment > package too). > > That way you can break apart sensible chunks into separate packages (up to > 54) and join them back with the central "give me everything" package > (which would be no. 55 at worst). > > I doubt however that it'll make sense to break apart more than ~10 packages > but I'll leave the decision up to you or someone more experienced with the > daily usage. A metapackage is basicly a package that does nothing but depends on other packages, so that installing a metapackage forces a combination of other packages to be installed. So if I created one package for every SE file, then I could define a metapackage SE-data-all that would depend on all of them. Some one else could define a packages that only depends on the modern data, SE-data-modern. The problem with this is that it requires me to package each file individually. I hoped to avoid doing this. If I define one virtual package for each file, I don't have to individually package each file. I can create one package that provides and conflicts with each individual virtual package=file and has a copy of all the data and call this SE-data-all. Someone else later could create a package that contained only the modern data, that would provide and conflict with each virtual package for which the coresponding file contained modern data and in would include only those files. They would call this SE-data-modern. Application programs could decide which virtual packages they wanted to depend on and recommend. Thus the maitreya astrology program could depend on the modern data and recommend all the other. At first my SE-data-all would be the only data package in existance, so maitreya would be forced to bring in all the data. But if someone later created SE-data-modern, the installer of maitreya could force only the modern data to be installed for a low diskspace application even though all the data would still be recommended. My original question is, is this a legitimate use of the virtual package concept? And does this exception apply > Packages MUST NOT use virtual package names (except privately, amongst > a cooperating group of packages) unless they have been agreed upon and > appear in this list. because programs that use the Swiss Ephemeris are a cooperating group of packages, so that I do not have to seek consensus on devian-devel? Thank You for considering this. -- Paul Elliott 1(512)837-1096 pelliott@BlackPatchPanel.com PMB 181, 11900 Metric Blvd Suite J http://www.free.blackpatchpanel.com/pme/ Austin TX 78758-3117
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