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Re: Seeking recommendations wrt. target-specific packages



Although we do have a unsolved
issue due to the ambiguity when there are more than one concrete
implementations in a package repository.  This means we can't simply
install high-level application packages and have apt-get resolve all
their dependencies automatically, as the packages for the specific
target may not be selected.

A similar situation exists for hardware-specific packages already in Debian, such as xserver-xorg-video-*, xserver-xorg-input-*, printer-driver-*. We're considering adopting this for the OpenCL packages (*-opencl-icd).

xorg's solution is to have an ORed dependency on (metapackage depending on all the hardware-specific packages) | (virtual package provided by each hardware-specific package):
https://packages.debian.org/jessie/xserver-xorg

The printer drivers have a similar metapackage, but with Recommends rather than Depends and no virtual package: https://packages.debian.org/sid/foomatic-db

These default to installing all the hardware-specific packages (and hence require there to be a mechanism for choosing the right one to use), but allows users to choose one if they want to (if they're short of space/bandwidth, or want to use one that isn't in Debian main and hence isn't included in the metapackage).


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