Re-usable software bundle definitions

The purpose of this version-controlled branch is to provide a list of metapackage definitions for installing sets of related software packages that serve a particular combined purpose.

The definitions reside in file collections.txt which shall always be kept sorted lexicographically according to locale "POSIX".

Format Description

Every line of text file file collections.txt shall use the following format: Fields of text separated by colon (:) characters.

Field 1

Name of the metapackage to be defined. At the end of the user-chosen metapackage name, a dash (-) and a 96-bit hexadecimal identifier in lower case shall be added. The hexadecimal identifier shall consist of the first 24 hex-nybbles of the MD5 hash of the dependencies field (see below).

Field 2

Revision identifier for the package, starting with 1.0 for the first revision. This identifier is used for comparing different revisions of the same metapackage, in order to find out which revision is the more recent one. Normally, revision 1.0 will be followed by 1.1, then 1.2 etc. Only in case of a fundamental change in the purpose of the package the first component number shall be incremented instead (resetting the 2nd number back to 0.)

Field 3

Metapackage type. There are 2 types: bundle is used for software suites, themed collections of software packages that the author of the metapackage thinks should be installed together. deps are software packages which need to be installed as prerequisites for manually-built software. For instance, when building a program hosted on GitHub, some *-dev packages may be required. A deps-metapackage can then be defined with the same name as the github software, pulling all required build prerequisites as its dependencies.

Field 4

The packages to be pulled in. This field shall have the same syntax as the "Depends"-Field in "dpkg -s" output, except that all whitespace shall be removed and all ","-separated terms shall be sorted lexicographically according to locale "POSIX". Note that a hash of this field will be used to obtain the hexadecimal identifier for field # 1, and the sorting helps create identical identifiers for identical dependency sets.

Usage of the package definitions

The entries of the collections.txt file can be used in order to create actual metapackages using my dpkg-register-dependencies-as-metapackage script.

For instance, assume $NAME shall be the user-chosen name-part of field # 1, $REV shall be the revision identifier from field # 2, and $DEPS shall be the contents of field # 4.

Then use the following command in order to create metapackage for metapackages where field # 3 is bundle:

$ dpkg-register-dependencies-as-metapackage -r $REV -d "$DEPS" $NAME

Or use the following command in order to create metapackage for metapackages where field # 3 is deps:

$ dpkg-register-dependencies-as-metapackage -r $REV -m -d "$DEPS" $NAME

Getting the metapackage installation script

The beformentioned script dpkg-register-dependencies-as-metapackage for building and installing the actual metadata packages can be found in the version-controlled branch xworld_debian-i7plqrb7887azjcnxws0tsve0.

Actually, the name prefix of the branch name may have changed - but the suffix i7plqrb7887azjcnxws0tsve0 of the branch name shall always remain the same. So search for the suffix if you should be unable to locate the full branch name as given here.

The repository containing that other branch should be located in a sibling repository where the repository containing THIS file you are currently reading is located.

I specifically do not want to give an absolute URL here, because URLs change all the time as hosting services come and go.