portable APT? [LWN.net]

portable APT?

Posted Nov 26, 2025 17:01 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: portable APT? by smcv
Parent article: APT Rust requirement raises questions

Or you use the gentoo approach with virtual packages - something like "Pid1 is essential, can be satisfied by SysV, systemd, OpenRC, yada yada".

So you can't uninstall the only one available from the list - if two are installed there's no problem uninstalling either.

Cheers,
Wol

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Debian virtual packages

Posted Nov 27, 2025 16:59 UTC (Thu) by timon (subscriber, #152974) [Link]

Debian does have virtual packages [1], e. g. “xserver” [2]; those you cannot install but they are provided by other packages. Debian also has metapackages [3], e. g. “init” [4] corresponding to your Gentoo example; those you can actually install, and they will then pull in relevant dependencies providing the actual functionality. The “apt” package [5] however doesn’t provide any relevant virtual package name.

[1]: https://packages.debian.org/stable/virtual/
[2]: https://packages.debian.org/stable/xserver
[3]: https://packages.debian.org/stable/metapackages/
[4]: https://packages.debian.org/stable/init
[5]: https://packages.debian.org/stable/apt