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 ยง3.6 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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
