Meta-what? Metapackages!

First time I heard about the metapackage was when I installed Ubuntu on a colleague’s machine then she told she wanted the pretty stuff on Kubuntu. I installed KDE on her machine then my colleague told me it wasn’t quite the same as the previous version she used. Apparently I should have installed kubuntu-desktop instead of kde. KDE did install KDE. The tweaks that Kubuntu has weren’t really there. And so my friend told me that kubuntu-desktop was the metapackage for KDE and all those funky settings that Kubuntu has.

So what if you have a metapackage?

It makes it easier for you to install stuff. You just need to apt-get install the metapackage and what the metapackage does is install the dependency files. In this case, kde and kubuntu-desktop. Because I installed kde, it really installed kde because it’s what the command was. However, apt-get install kubuntu-desktop makes it funkier. It was the one that pulled the dependecies for me already.

I read from Iandefor’s blog that metapackages have a control file. And that’s where the details of the package dependencies are. It says what must be installed.

Another thing about metapackages: they could also be seen as groups of packages lumped together but they are not really equal to each of those packages. So if you uninstall a metapackage, you are not necessarily uninstalling the actual packages. You’d have to uninstall them one by one. In the case of kubuntu-desktop, if you want to remove particular apps, you could. If you know the actual package. So don’t panic all the time when you’re asked about what you’re going to uninstall.