What is a meta package and how can I take advantage of it?
A meta package is a package that only contains its dependencies in the slack-required file. There is nothing in the package to install, it just provides a name and a dependency list. A good example would be GNOME. If a “gnome” meta package existed that required the gtk libraries and gnome applications, your user could install the gnome meta package without having to know all of the packages that go along with it. This is a good application of dependencies and suggestions. When rolling out a new version of your application suite (gnome in our example), you can increment the version of the meta package and change the included packages and their required versions. That way you can roll out a 2.x release update, but provide an easy way to roll back to a previous 1.x release of the entire application suite.
