Sounds weird, doesn't it? I would like to know what is the general feeling about this idea, with a use case.
Let me start with a practical use case: Qt. As you might or not know, Qt is build by using "submodules" that create the whole SDK: https://qt-kde-team.pages.debian.net/images/qt6_build_deps.png At the moment of this writing Qt has 36 submodules. Almost all of them provide a -dev package with the usual headers et al, and required dependencies. So, if you install qt6-multimedia-dev you should also get basic stuff like qt6-base-dev. Apart from being easier to build, this approach lets package maintainers install only the necessary build dependencies when building their packages. But users would love to have something like 'qt6-full-dev'. And the reason we never provided them with this meta-package is that package maintainers would use it almost everywhere, dragging the whole Qt installation on each package depending on it... This is a _huge_ waste of resources and buildd time (or is it not??) So, what about if we could have [meta] packages that can be installed by the user but not used as Build-Depends entries? Please note that for the moment I'm targeting more at the idea itself rather than at the implementation (but I'll certainly love to know if you have an idea on how could this be implemented). At one point I thought of adding a Lintian test checking for this kind of usage, but first and foremost I would like to know if you think this is a viable/acceptable idea, maybe even adding a special section in our policy. Again, comments welcomed. Thanks, Lisandro. -- Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer https://perezmeyer.com.ar/
