Comment 3 for bug 526330

An answer to my first question:

<mpt> If anyone knows how a computer program can tell the difference between a transitional Ubuntu package and a non-transitional one, please let us know in bug 526330
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<seb128> mpt, it can't really I think
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<seb128> mpt, seems we would need to add extra informations in the system somewhat
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<mpt> seb128, how about "Depends on one other package and contains no files itself"?
<seb128> mpt, those have files, ie copyright, etc
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<chrisccoulson> "no files itself" is normally incorrect
<mvo> mpt: not trivially, there is a idea to add a "transitional" section that would solve it nicely
<chrisccoulson> yeah ;)
<seb128> so it would be "no file out of the standard ones"
<seb128> but they are not the only one in this case
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<mvo> and we don't know the filelist until we downloaded it
<seb128> like we have common packages stripped from translations matching as well
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<mpt> mvo, is anyone/anything tracking the progress of the "transitional" section idea?
<Laney> there's a lintian tag empty-binary-package
<Laney> you could look how that works
<Laney> I think it looks at the description to decide to exclude transitional packages, so inverting that logic could fly
<mvo> mpt: not currently :( its something that ideally would be part of the debian policy and is useful for other things (like automatic dependency tracking). the best way forward is probably to start a discussion on debian-devel

If anyone gets this organized, please reassign back to me for design work. In the meantime, an answer to my second question would still be useful: Who would ever want to see transitional packages, and when?