From: Mike Edenfield <kutulu@kutulu.org>
To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Virtual Packages
Date: Wed, 11 May 2011 23:18:08 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <4DCB5170.70901@kutulu.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20110511224326.58bd1cb7@november>
On 5/11/2011 5:43 PM, John wrote:
>
> Have noticed that some packages require virtual packages to installed
> as well. For example when installing dev-db/mysql, virtual/mysql is
> installed as well.
>
> What are the purposes of these "virtual" packages??
They allow other packages to depend on the presence of a
"service" or "feature" instead of depending on a specific
implementation. For example, both sys-libs/pam and
sys-auth/openpam satisfy "virtual/pam", since most
applications will work just find against either library.
There's about a dozen possible packages that provide
"virtual/bootloader".
It's also used to allow different architectures to have
different "default" implementations of the same service
(like virtual/libc).
virtual/mysql, as of v5.1, can mean dev-db/mysql or
dev-db/mariadb.
--Mike
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2011-05-12 3:20 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 4+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2011-05-11 21:43 [gentoo-user] Virtual Packages John
2011-05-11 22:07 ` Paul Hartman
2011-05-12 3:18 ` Mike Edenfield [this message]
2011-05-13 15:50 ` dong l
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