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virtual packages and hardware-dependent packages



1. When which of a set of "driver" packages is required depends on the hardware, is defaulting to installing all of them but allowing the user to choose one if they really want to (as xserver-xorg does[0]) still the recommended solution?

2. If a real and a virtual package have the same name, are we allowed to assume that apt will default to the real package? Experiment suggests it currently does, but I haven't seen this documented.

We are currently considering whether to introduce such an all-drivers package for OpenCL [1], where currently applications Depend: on and drivers Provide: the virtual package opencl-icd. If we can assume (2), we could call the all-drivers package opencl-icd and not need to change other packages; if we can't, it would be opencl-icd-all and applications would need to change to Depends: opencl-icd-all | opencl-icd to take advantage of it.

[0] https://packages.debian.org/sid/xserver-xorg
[1] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-opencl-devel/Week-of-Mon-20140421/000122.html


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