Re: virtual package? aptitude says "not a real package".

[Michael Spang <mike@midgard.no-ip.org>]

furufuru@ccsr.u-tokyo.ac.jp wrote:

> Kumar Appaiah wrote:
>
>  
>
> > On my system, apt-cache show emacs-dl-wn gives me black, install says
> > that package is unavailable.
> >    
>
> Thanks for your response!  I'm still puzzled.  What's this "ghost"
> package, then?  The "mplayer" package seems to be another example.
> If they are unavailable, then why do they show up when you type
>
>   $ aptitude search mplayer
>
> for example.  What does this mean?
>
>  
It means that there is no such package but that something depends or 
conflicts with the package. These packages are just referenced by others 
even though they arent in the archive. This happens for a variety of 
reasons.



mike@Tyr:~$ apt-cache showpkg mplayer
Package: mplayer
Versions:

Reverse Depends:
 xmms-xmmplayer,mplayer
 mozilla-mplayer,mplayer 1.0-pre5
Dependencies:
Provides:
Reverse Provides: