As the title suggests, I want to get a list of all packages that provide a certain virtual package. A way of doing this would be to write a shell script that parses all output of
apt-cache search -f .*
and outputs all packages that have the virtual package in the provides section. The problem with this approach is that it takes an awful long amount of time to execute. I guess that there should be a simple command that does this in an efficient manner, but which I wasn't able to find.
If you have aptitude installed, it provides a lot of patterns that can be used for searching.
In particular, for the case of looking for packages that provide a given virtual package name, you can use this:
$ aptitude search '?provides(pattern)'
where pattern can be set to the virtual package name you're looking for.
For example:
$ aptitude search -F %p '?provides(mail-reader)'
balsa
bsd-mailx
claws-mail
cone
emacs
emacs23
emacs23-lucid
emacs23-nox
evolution
gnus
im
jed
kmail
kmail-mobile
mailutils
mailutils-mh
mew
mew-beta
mew-beta-bin
mew-bin
mutt
nmh
opera
opera-next
seamonkey-mailnews
sylpheed
thunderbird
tkrat
vm
wl
wl-beta
xemacs21-mule
xemacs21-mule-canna-wnn
xemacs21-nomule
xjed
xul-ext-lightning